Experience with NAA and radionuclides in an industrial laboratory

Radioisotopes have been used in a nide variety of industrial applications s ince the early 1950s. At DSM, a Dutch chemicals and materials group, the fi rst applications were introduced around 1955, when the company was still a coal mining enterprise. These applications, developed at DSM Research, main ly concerned on-line density measurements for process- control purposes. Pr ocess control is still the main field of application of radioisotopes in in dustry in general. Over the past thirty years many other industrial applications of radioisoto pes have been developed. This has also been the case at DSM, which may be c onsidered representative of the chemical industry. These applications, such as column scanning and the radiotracer technique, have become indispensabl e tools and are nowadays used on a routine basis. The reason for this succe ss is that these applications can be performed on-line without any interfer ence with the production process and under normal production conditions. Th e last nuclear technique to be introduced at DSM Research was neutron activ ation analysis.