Members of the R&D team at Precision Acoustics are due to travel to Cumbria next month to irradiate three new styles of sensor which have been designed to withstand high levels of radiation.
The team aim to achieve a cumulative dose of 10 MGy of gamma radiation over a three-week period. This will be followed up in the New Year with some additional testing in a European TRIGA reactor to investigate the compound effect of neutron and gamma radiation.
Two variants of ultrasonic transducer based on the piezopolymer PVDF are being trialled with the aim of establishing the effect of irradiation on their performance and their capacity to be used for non-destructive testing applications in high radiation environments. The third sensor variant will be based on Precision Acoustics’ fibreoptic hydrophone.
This work will be part of the ReDRESS project which is supported by InnovateUK.
Stay posted for further updates as the team analyse the data in 2019.
Pictured, is Megan Jenkinson characterising the radiation resilient transducers.
