Development of measurement methods and dose evaluating algorithms for electronic personal dosimeter

Abstract

For personal radiation dose monitoring, electronic personal dosimeters (EPD), also known as active personal dosimeter (APD), using silicon diode detector have the advantage capability of measuring and displaying directly the exposure results of gamma, beta and neutron radiations in real time. They are mainly considered as good complement to passive dosimeters to satisfy ALARA principle in the radiation protection. In this paper, the meansurement methods and algorithms for evaluating personal dose equivalents such as Hp(10) and Hp(0.07) from air-kerma are studied and developed in two directions: the first, named energy correction method based on incident energy determined by the ratio of two detector responses with the different filter configurations; the second new method is carried out in the way that matching the shape of a detector’s energy response curve to the kerma-to-personal dose equivalent conversion function provides an approximate means of determining the dose equivalent without the need to resolve the actual incident energies. The algorithm has also been experimentally verified at Secondary Standards Dosimetry Laboratory (SSDL) of INST by the beam of radiation defined in ISO 4037-1. The obtained results of personal dose equivalents with errors almost less than 30% in energy range from 20 keV to 1.5 MeV are partially met the EPD design requirements according to the IEC 61526 Standard. The work and results of described in this paper are important basics for design and construction of completed electronic personal dosimeter.