Development of neutron activation system on EAST

Abstract

A neutron activation system (NAS) has been developed on the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) for the investigation of time-integrated neutron yield. It is a robust neutron diagnostic with high precision and a wide dynamic range. Some high purity materials with a proper nuclear reaction energy threshold and cross section are tested as neutron detectors in the NAS, and they are delivered to the tokamak device by a pneumatic transfer system. The length of the pneumatic pipeline is about 50 m, and the transfer time ranges from 10 s to 20 s. The decay gamma rays of the activated samples are measured with a high-purity germanium spectrometer, and its detection efficiencies are 6.9% at 336 keV and 1.7% at 1779 keV, respectively. Indium and silicon samples with a reaction threshold of 0.3 MeV and 4.0 MeV, respectively, were successfully implemented in the diagnosis of DD and DT neutron yield in the EAST. The neutron flux of the NAS was compared with the count of the fission chamber in the EAST neutral beam injection experiment, and the DD neutron yield evaluated by the NAS ranges from 1.9 × 1012 n/shot to 5.9 × 1014 n/shot during recent experimental campaign.