Novel Thin-Film Ceria Membrane Materials for Small-Scale Oxygen Generation Systems

65872 The United States government sponsors various programs to monitor the release of fission products into the air. Areas of concern are containment failures in nuclear power plants as well as the detonation of nuclear bombs by rogue states. One way of detecting these events is to monitor the radioactivity of small airborne dust particles that are transported around the globe. Another is to assay the radioactivity of local soil samples, looking for tell-tale signs of fallout. Hence, there is a need for a compact g-ray spectrometer system that can support a small number of radiation detectors. By requiring a small coincidence window across events from multiple g-ray detectors, sensitivity of this instrument can be increased by several orders of magnitude. This project will produce a compact instrument that can accommodate a varying number of detectors and measure g-radiation in coincidence across the members of a detector array. The instrument will provide a scalable, multi-detector g-ray spectrometer with coincidence and pulse shape analysis capabilities within a single enclosure, without requiring any external circuitry, and accessible through a single PCI computer interface. Phase I will create a 4-channel prototype and demonstrate coincidence spectroscopy across an array of detectors in a portable system. Commercial Applications And Other Benefits as described by awardee: A system that provides g-ray spectroscopy for multiple detectors, which is portable and provides access through a single standard PCI computer interface, should be of great use in counting rooms and other applications where it is essential to quickly configure spectroscopy setups with a minimum time and expertise required. Also, small-scale nuclear physics experiments, which cannot afford to build their own dedicated data acquisition systems, would benefit