Contaminated labs and facilities
Help clean up contaminated laboratories, workspaces, and facilities by locating alpha activity remotely.
Applications & tests
Long-range alpha imaging for practical nuclear and laboratory challenges.
Applications
Where remote alpha imaging can help.
Nuclear decommissioning
Aid nuclear decommissioning by supporting faster surveys of rooms, equipment, ducts, cells, and waste routes.
Glovebox monitoring
Help monitor alpha contamination inside gloveboxes used for fuel processing and other controlled operations.
Nuclear waste management
Support waste characterisation, sorting, packaging, and inspection workflows where alpha emitters may be present.
Nuclear forensics
Provide visual evidence of alpha-emitting material distribution for nuclear forensic assessment.
Uranium enrichment assessment
Assess uranium enrichment based on surface alpha activity and spatial distribution.
Tests
Representative imaging tests and measured performance.
Uranium source detection
~500 Bq/cm2 uranium detected at 1 m.
A natural uranium metal sample with a surface alpha activity of approximately 500 Bq/cm2 was detected at 1 m in 1 hour. Am and Pu surfaces are typically tens of kBq/cm2 or higher and can be detected within several minutes.
Indoor daytime operation
Simple light blocking is usually sufficient indoors.
For indoor environments at daytime, simple light blocking material, as shown in the picture, is usually sufficient to block sunlight and enable alpha signal imaging.
Outdoor sunlight operation
Solar-blind filtering suppresses solar background.
If outdoor operation under sunlight is required, a <280 nm solar-blind filter can suppress the solar background. A 3 MBq Am-241 source was detected at 70 cm in 10 minutes. A portable power supply provided approximately 4 hours of operation during the test.
Night-time background subtraction
343 nm reference channel supports background correction.
At night, city and moon light can still contribute UV background. A 343 nm reference channel, where ambient UV is present but alpha signal is negligible, can be used for background subtraction.
Glovebox operation
Gloveboxes provide a low-background environment for sensitive alpha imaging.
Installing the alpha camera inside a glovebox is ideal because its Perspex window effectively blocks external UV background. A pure nitrogen atmosphere can increase the alpha-induced radioluminescence signal by approximately five times. Using an alternative wavelength, the camera can also image alpha contamination from outside the glovebox.
Robotics platform integration
Drone and robotic scanning for large-area alpha contamination.
The alpha camera can be mounted on a drone or other robotic platform for fast, precise scanning of large areas affected by alpha contamination. A stabilizer keeps the image steady during motion and can automatically adjust the scanning angle.
Distance response
Signal decreases approximately inversely with distance.
The normalised signal intensity, defined as signal divided by the number of occupied pixels, decreases approximately inversely with distance. This is better than inverse-square loss because the number of pixels occupied by the source also decreases with distance.
