Performance investigation of the pulse and Campbelling modes of a fission chamber using a Poisson pulse train simulation code
Journal article, 2015

The detectors of the neutron flux monitoring system of the foreseen French GEN-IV sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) will be high temperature fission chambers placed in the reactor vessel in the vicinity of the core. The operation of a fission chamber over a wide-range neutron flux will be feasible provided that the overlap of the applicability of its pulse and Campbelling operational modes is ensured. This paper addresses the question of the linearity of these two modes and it also presents our recent efforts to develop a specific code for the simulation of fission chamber pulse trains. Our developed simulation code is described and its overall verification is shown. An extensive quantitative investigation was performed to explore the applicability limits of these two standard modes. It was found that for short pulses the overlap between the pulse and Campbelling modes can be guaranteed if the standard deviation of the background noise is not higher than 5% of the pulse amplitude. It was also shown that the Campbelling mode is sensitive to parasitic noise, while the performance of the pulse mode is affected by the stochastic amplitude distributions.

Filtered Poisson process

Simulation

Fission chamber

Neutron flux monitoring

Pulse mode

Author

Zsolt Elter

Chalmers, Applied Physics, Nuclear Engineering

C. Jammes

The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA)

Imre Pazsit

Chalmers, Applied Physics, Nuclear Engineering

L. Pal

Hungarian Academy of Sciences

P. Filliatre

The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA)

Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research, Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment

0168-9002 (ISSN)

Vol. 774 60-67

Subject Categories

Other Engineering and Technologies

DOI

10.1016/j.nima.2014.11.065

More information

Latest update

4/11/2018