Remote distributed optical fibre dose measuring of high gamma-irradiation with highly sensitive Al- and P-doped fibres

Abstract

We present our results on measuring distributed Radiation-Induced Absorption (RIA) by means of a commercially available Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry (OFDR) system. We also compare distributed OFDR RIA measurements with spatially integrated spectral transmission detection using an Optical Spectra Analyser (OSA). We have chosen four different highly gamma-radiation sensitive fibres, two of which were doped with Al and two with P. The dose rate during irradiations was about 590 Gy/h. The irradiations were conducted at temperatures of 30°C and 80°C. Different temperatures were needed for studying the temperature dependence of the annealing speed of RIA. All four fibres demonstrated a strong saturation-like increase of RIA with the dose accumulation up to several tens of dB/m as detected by the OSA. In case of the OFDR measurements the change of the absorption in an optical fibre resulted in a clear change of the slope of the corresponding Rayleigh backscattering trace. The RIA dependences measured with the OFDR were in a reasonable agreement with the measurements obtained with the OSA. This allows us to use the RIA dependences on absorption dose obtained by means of OSA for the distributed dose reconstruction based on the OFDR technique. We also irradiated different lengths of one of the P-doped fibers to see if it influences accuracy of the distributed dose detection and to find out the minimal possible length of the probe. The results of the presented experiments provide a basis for a dose estimation model based on RIA in which temperature oscillations are taken into account.