A preliminary study on real-time Rn/Tn discriminative detection using air-flow delay in two ion chambers in series

Abstract

Due to its short half-life, thoron gas has been assumed to have negligible health hazards on humans compared to radon. But, one of the decay products with a long half-life can make it to be transported to a long distance and to cause a severe internal dose through respiration. Since most commercial radon detectors can not discriminate thoron signals from radon signals, it is very common to overestimate radon doses which in turn result in biased estimation of lung cancer risk in epidemiological studies. Though some methods had been suggested to measure thoron and radon separately, they could not be used for real-time measurement because of CR-39 or LR-115. In this study, an effective method was suggested to measure radon and thoron separately from the free air. It was observed that the activity of thoron decreases exponentially due to delay time caused by a long pipe between two chambers. Therefore from two ion chambers apart in time, it was demonstrated that thoron and radon could be measured separately and simultaneously. We also developed a collimated alpha source and with this source and an SBD, we could convert the ion chamber reading to count rate in cps.

Keywords

• Radon
• Thoron
• Discriminative measurement
• Ion chamber
• Air-flow delay