ESTIMATING STRENGTHS OF INDIVIDUAL RADIOISOTOPES IN A MULTIPLE-ISOTOPE SOURCE

Abstract

In work related to radiation shielding, the use of radioisotope techniques, and activation analysis, an experimenter must often analyze counting data where counts are caused by the natural background and by the decay of more than one radioisotope. In the report a procedure is developed for estimating the strength of each isotope at different times from several decaying radioactive samples of a single multiple-isotope source. In addition, the procedure provides a method for placing confidence limits on the strengths and a method for partitioning the imprecision of estimating the strengths into three principal causes: Poisson variation, sampling error, and residual error (called mechanical error). An operational FORTRAN II-D computer program, SAND, implements the procedure. The procedure and program were tested by using fictitious data with known properties as inputs. The results of the simulation were in reasonable agreement with the theoretical values.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 01, 1967
Accession Number
AD0662192

Entities

People

  • M. L. Eaton
  • W. L. Wilcoxson

Organizations

  • Naval Facilities Engineering Service Center

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Civil Engineering
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Confidence Limits
  • Data Science
  • Information Science
  • Materials
  • Mathematical Models
  • Models
  • Nuclear Physics
  • Radiation Shielding
  • Random Variables
  • Simulations
  • Statistical Analysis
  • Three Dimensional
  • Two Dimensional

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry
  • Regression Analysis.