Exploring the ENEA Casaccia and ENEA Frascati irradiation capabilities: Status and perspectives

Abstract

A collaboration between different facilities in Casaccia and Frascati ENEA research centers has recently opened the possibility of performing irradiation experiments using different kinds of particles such as protons, neutrons, and electrons. The facilities involved in the project are the TAPIRO fast nuclear research reactor, the TOP-IMPLART proton accelerator (71 MeV), the REX electron accelerator (5 MeV) and the FNG neutron facility (2.5/14 MeV). This suite of plans represents a distributed irradiation facility using different particles and spectra, offering various irradiation capabilities for experiments in many fields, such as: nuclear physics, accelerator physics, aerospace, science material, medicine, detectors, radiation diagnostics, etc. Complete numerical models of all the facilities have been implemented to perform start-to-end simulations before experimental irradiation using beam dynamics and nuclear transport simulation codes. In addition, our distributed irradiation facility makes it possible to recreate an essential part of the Van Allen Belt radiation allowing us to check the FLUKA quantitative calibration regarding this specific simulation, facilitating the disentanglements of the uncertainties. Finally, a comparison of the estimated silicon 1 MeV neutron equivalent fluence (SI1MEVNE) of the radiation damage imparted by the different facilities is presented.

Keywords

• nuclear research reactor
• particle accelerator physics
• neutron generator
• irradiation facility
• aerospace
• science material
• beam dynamics
• monte carlo simulations