Research & Development On Intelligent Multi-Channel Nuclear Spectrometer

Intelligent nuclear instrument has been a dominant developing direction of radioactivity measurement instrument, and has far-reaching impact on the fields such as applied nuclear techniques, international nuclear safety, weapon inspection ,national defence engineering and scientific test.As a nuclear instrument, multi-channel analyzer (MCA) is mainly applied to nuclear logging, y-ray spectrum measurement and X-ray fluorescence measurement, which are based on nuclear spectrum analysis.Intelligent multi-channel nuclear spectrometer is a major part of the multichannel analyzer.This paper mainly presents the research & development on the spectrometer. The spectrometer system consists of nuclear signal processing circuit,specetrum data-collecting subsystem and application software. Nuclear signal processing circuit mainly consists of linear amplifier and pulse shaped-circuit. The specetrum data-collecting subsystem is controlled by a single-chip micro-controller AT89C52, including 1024-channel pulse-height analyzer and RS232C serial communication interface. The application software includes spectrum data-processing subsystem and interactive interface between the instrument and users. The development of the software is based on Personal Computer or notebook computer with RS232C interface by LabWindows/CVI in MS-Windows system.At last, the intelligent multi-channel nuclear spectrometer has been combined with X-ray fluorescence probe to analyze several mineral samples.