MEASURING, ACQUIRING AND RECORDING OF THE NEUTRON FLUX INTENSITY AT THE CAIRO FOURIER DIFFRACTOMETER

Abstract

The present work deals with a simple and accurate system for measuring, acquiring and recording of the neutron flux intensity at the Cairo Fourier diffractometer facility (CFDF). Accordingly, the suitable detector, followed by preamplifier, amplifier and discriminator is connected to a data acquisition system designed specially for this purpose. This system applies a PC interface board and software handler based on the periodic interrupt technique to periodically acquire the number of digital pulses that arrive from one or more neutron counters during a certain time period and stores these data, along with the relative time-channel, in the PC's memory. The instant variations of the neutron flux can be displayed for monitoring purpose. The whole information from the detectors can be preserved and made available for software analysis and statistics; such as computing the average and integral flux during any time period. The main features of the system are simplicity and low cost, so it can be widely applied.