PERFORMANCE TESTING OF 2 DUAL-ENERGY PULSERS

The Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) has been developing a dual energy pulser for dead time and random summing corrections, and for the assessment of the quality of the data for many years. This eff ort now includes several revisions of the original concept. Recently, Canberra has developed a version of this dual energy pulser as part of a technology transfer from INEL to Canberra Industries. This new desi gn includes many of the same characteristics as the original INEL desi gn. In this paper, we will present the results of a series of tests pe rformed at INEL with both the latest INEL pulser design and the Canber ra design. These test results include measurement results of pulser pe ak width, energy equivalence and dead rime and random summing correcti on capability as a function of count rate and temperature. It is demon strated that both designs perform comparably with count rate and tempe rature when operated over a limited temperature range. In applications where extreme temperature variations are likely during the measuremen ts, the INEL design is the better choice.