A simulation study for a cost-effective PET-like detector system intended to track particles in granular assemblies

Abstract

Since many industrial applications rely on the processing of densely packed and moving granular material, obtaining bulk internal information on the particle movement inside the reactors is of great importance. Such information can be delivered by Positron Emission Particle Tracking (PEPT). By marking pellets with a positron-emitting radioisotope, the position of these tracer particles can be determined via the time-of-flight differences of the emitted gamma-ray pairs. The current paper proposes a PET-like detector system based on cost-effective organic plastic scintillators instead of the more common but expensive inorganic scintillators. This system is currently under construction and was tested for its resolution and efficiency in this simulation study. Using Monte Carlo simulations and the software toolkit Geant4, three different geometries (an empty glass box, a generic grate system, and a cubic box of 1 m3 completely filled with pellets) were investigated, leading to a spatial resolution in the millimeter range and an efficiency, defined as the ratio of reconstructed decay locations to simulated decays, of 2.7%, 1.4%, and 0.3%.