Science and Technology Journal of BgNS, VOL. 13, No. 1, JUNE 2009
ISSN 1310-8727
Title:
NEW CADMIUM TRANSMISSION MEASUREMENTS IN THE
THERMAL AND LOW ENERGY REGION AT GELINA
Authors:
I.Z. Ivanov, P. Siegler, S. Kopecky, M. Moxon
Abstract:
Sheets of cadmium (Cd) of variant thickness are often used as a neutron
absorber in integral neutron experiments, such as integral benchmark and neutron
activation measurements. The near-thermal resonance in 113Cd at 0.178 eV removes the
neutron flux below at a nominal energy of 0.5 eV. Consequently, the neutron crosssections of natCd are very important for a correct interpretation and analysis of such
experiments. Nonetheless, the neutron total, capture and scattering cross sections in
cadmium have not been studied often and experiments covering the energy region from a
few meV up to the low energy part of the resolve resonance region (RRR) have not been
performed. The last major experiment, that could be used in non-fundamental applications
was performed by Liou et al. in 1974.
The lack of good quality data for cadmium may be a source of the long standing
discrepancy between resonance integral measurements and the values calculated from the
resolved resonance parameters. Therefore, it was suggested that some new measurements
should be carried out at IRMM Geel on natural cadmium to try to resolve this problem.
These measurements were performed in collaboration with the IAEA, Vienna in the
framework of NUDAME. As a part of these measurements we carried out 8 new cadmium
transmission measurements at 50 Hz working frequency of GELINA. These experiments
were built up at 26 m and 50 m flight paths, using natural cadmium samples with
thicknesses of 0.030 mm, 0.050 mm, 0,125 mm, 25.8 mm enriched up to 99.99 % in Cd,
and a Cd (NO3)24H2O solution sample.
The transmission measurements at 50 Hz of the two thin Cd foil samples and the Cd
solution sample were performed in order to obtain data in the thermal energy region, from
which we could extract the resonance parameters for the first well-known resonance in
113
Cd at 0.178 eV. These data were compared to existing data in the ENDF/B-VI library.
In this paper we report our first results from the analysis including resonance parameters,
extracted from the transmission data by using the analysis code REFIT.
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