Coincidence summing correction for a voluminous 152Eu source

Abstract

A code is developed to correct for the coincidence summing effect in detecting a voluminous gamma source, and this code is applied to a152Eu standard source as a test case. The source is 1000 mL of liquid in a cylindrical shape. To calculate the coincidence summing effect, the cylindrical source is considered as 10(radial) × 8(height) sectional sources. For each sectional source, the peak efficiency and total efficiency are obtained by Monte Carlo simulation at each energy for 10 energies between 50 keV and 2000 keV. The efficiencies of each sector are then expressed as polynomials of gamma energy. To calculate the correction coefficients for the coincidence summing effect, the KORSUM code is used after modification. The magnitudes of correction are 4%–17% for the standard 152Eu source measured in this study. The relative deviation of 4.7% before the coincidence correction is reduced to 0.8% after the correction is applied to the efficiency based on the measured gamma line. Hence, this study has shown that a new method has been developed that is applicable for correcting the coincidence effect in a voluminous source, and the method is applied to the measured data of a standard 152Eu cylinder source.