Pedagogical radiation detector simulator with radioactive sources embedded in an ARM Cortex-M7 MCU

Abstract

There are occasions such as laboratory practices, educational explanations or calibrations where the use of radioactive sources may be exempted, by replacing them with nuclear pulse generators, the imminent risk inherent in using radioactive sources can be avoided altogether. For this reason, a radiation detector simulator with radioactive sources was developed and implemented for laboratory or academic experiments. Which is capable of forming the pulses necessary to reproduce a gamma radiation spectrum with the same characteristics as that obtained by using a radiation detector with a radioactive source. The simulation is confined to a thalliumdoped sodium iodide scintillator detector with 5 radioactive sources (Cesium 137, Cobalt 60, Barium 133, Sodium 22 and Europium 152) in addition to the radioactive background. The system has as main features that not only generates nuclear pulses, but also provides the physical conditions to place the sources (simulated by radio frequency identifier token) on the detector (simulated by radio frequency identifier reader) and adjust the number of pulses generated according to the distance from the source to the detector (simulated by a distance detector), as well as being able to detect the absence of a radioactive source and only generate the radioactive background.