Rabbit System


As an enhancement to the existing photoactivation setup, a rabbit system for the pneumatic transport of activated samples from the irradiation site to the measurement site has been built recently. With this, the main advantage is that we can access short-lived nuclides with half-lives below 10 min by transporting the irradiated samples within about 15 s from the electron beam dump into a well-shielded low-level counting setup (See the sketch of the setup). The whole system uses compressed air to transport the samples through polyamide (PA) tubes with a diverter making way to the to-and-fro movement of the sample cartridges. The samples to be irradiated are enclosed in polyethylene cassettes and loaded in Station A. They are shot to the high photon flux area behind the vacuum steel vessel aligned on the axis of the electron beam (Station B). After irradiation, the samples are transported to the lead-shielded low-level counting setup where the decay is measured with a coaxial high-purity Germanium (HPGe) detector with a relative efficiency of 90%. The loss time of 15 seconds arises from the time taken for transport of the sample plus placing the sample center above the HPGe detector. After the decay measurement, samples are shot to a radiation shielded container (labeled depot).