Chapter 5 - APPLICATIONS OF THE POINT KERNEL TECHNIQUE

Abstract

In the point kernel technique, the fundamental assumption is made that nuclear reactors, and other extended sources of radiation, can be regarded as consisting of differential isotropic point sources and that the effect of the radiation from the whole source, at the point of interest, can be obtained by the summation of the contributions from the individual differential sources that comprise the entire source region. The effect of the radiation at a particular point is usually identified with the response of an idealized detector situated there. There are two different approaches for solving the spatial integration problem. The analytic approach can be achieved at the cost of considerable simplification of the actual source-shield configuration. The great merit of this approach is that it produces formulae for basic source-shield configurations, which provide the quickest means of obtaining approximate answers to many practical shielding problems. The direct numerical integration approach implemented on a computer by means of computer programs is often of fairly sophisticated form. The advantage of this approach is that there is no longer the necessity to contrive the kernel to have special mathematical properties that are conducive to an analytical solution.