Speaker
Description
China is steadily advancing the development of nuclear-energy facilities along its coastal regions. This trend increases the demand for real-time, high-precision $\gamma$-ray monitoring of seawater for routine environmental surveillance and emergency preparedness. To address this, a power-efficient, buoy-mounted marine $\gamma$-ray spectrometer was developed that integrates a high-resolution CdZnTe (CZT) detector with a high-efficiency CsI(Tl) scintillation detector. The readout electronics provide full-waveform digitization and an FPGA-based data acquisition (DAQ) architecture. The Kintex-7 FPGA firmware integrates data acquisition and digital signal processing, data storage and transmission, and system control and monitoring, thereby enabling long-term unattended operation. System linearity and noise were evaluated with injected charges of 10–1300 fC, resulting in an integral nonlinearity < 0.062% and a baseline RMS noise < 2.75 ADC counts under battery-powered operation. Using a $^{137}$Cs source, the CZT detector achieved an energy resolution of 2.28% at 662 keV. During an 88-h nearshore deployment off Weihai, China, the system operated continuously. The measured $\gamma$-ray dose rate in seawater ranged from 2.81 to 3.23 nGy$\cdot$h$^{-1}$, and the system successfully resolved characteristic peaks from naturally occurring radionuclides, including $^{40}$K and nuclides from the uranium and thorium decay series. These results demonstrate that the proposed dual-detector spectrometer, together with its power-efficient electronics and DAQ architecture, satisfies the requirements for in situ radiation monitoring in complex marine environments. This work provides a basis for deploying a networked system of marine radiation-monitoring stations.
| Minioral | No |
|---|---|
| IEEE Member | No |
| Are you a student? | Yes |