The EURITRACK Project: Development of a Tagged Neutron Inspection System for Cargo Containers

The EURopean Illicit TRAfficing Countermeasures Kit project is part of the 6th European Union Framework Program, and aims at developing a neutron inspection system for detecting threat materials (explosives, drugs) in cargo containers. Neutron interaction in the container produces specific gamma-rays used to determine the chemical composition of the inspected material. An associated particle sealed tube neutron generator is developed to allow precise location of the interaction point by direction and time-of-flight measurements of the neutrons tagged by alpha-particles. The EURITRACK project consists in developing: a transportable deuterium-tritium neutron generator including a position sensitive alpha detector (matrix of YAP:Ce crystals coupled to a multi-anode photomultiplier), fast neutron and gamma-ray detectors, front-end electronics to perform coincidence and spectroscopic measurements, and an integrated software which manages neutron generator and detectors positioning, data acquisition and analysis. All components are currently being developed and tested by the consortium partners. Current status of this work and provisional performances of the system assessed by Monte Carlo calculations are presented.

PEROT Bertrand;  PEERANI Paolo;  SEQUEIRA Vitor;  SALVATO Martino; 

2007-01-30

SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering

JRC34620

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC34620,