Review of ISPRA 2014 Results


September 27, 2016

This post looks back on PTI’s outstanding showing in the 3He Alternatives for International Safeguards Workshop that took place at the JRC Ispra, Italy, in October 2014 two years ago. During the workshop, PTI and two other companies compared their High Level Neutron Coincidence Counters (HLNCC) against the gold standard 3He HLNCC. PTI’s HLNCC based on boron-coated straws beat the competition in all three reported categories (Efficiency, die away time, figure of merit). In fact, PTI’s detector even beat the 3He detector in both die away time and figure of merit categories!  The workshop chairman was quoted as saying that “PTI has quite a mature product that is nearly field deployable. The performance is equivalent or even better than the 3He HLNCC,” despite being relatively early in R&D on this detector. Since then, PTI has continued to improve the BCS technology for coincidence counting and other applications. Clearly, BCS technology is an outstanding option for reliable, low-cost neutron detectors for coincidence counting applications.

For more details on the results of the Ispra 2014 workshop and a comparison between the tested detectors, click here.