In emergency situations such as nuclear accidents or terrorism, radioactive and nuclear materials can be released by some environmental reasons such as the atmosphere and underground water. To secure the safety of human beings and to respond appropriately emergency situation, it is required to designate high and low dose rate regions in the early stages by analyzing the location and radioactivity of sources through environmental radiation measurement. This research team has developed a small gamma probe which is featured by its geometrical accessibility and higher radiation sensitivity than other drone detectors. A plastic scintillator and Silicon Photomultiplier (SiPM) were applied to the probe to optimize the wireless measurement condition. SiPM has a higher gain (higher than 106) and lower operating voltage (less than 30 V) compared to a general photodiode. However, the electronic components in the SiPM are sensitively affected by temperature, which causes the performance degradation of the SiPM. As the SiPM temperature increases, the breakdown voltage (VBD) of the SiPM also increases, so the gain must be maintained by applying the appropriate VBD. Therefore, when the SiPM temperature increases while the VBD is fixed, the gain decreases. Thus, the signal does not exceed the threshold voltage (VTH) and the overall count is reduced. In general, the optimal gain is maintained by cooling the SiPM or through a temperature compensation circuit. However, in the developed system, the hardware correction method such as cooling or temperature compensation circuit cannot be applied. In this study, it was confirmed that the count decreased by up to 20% according to the increase in the temperature of the SiPM when the probe was operated at room temperature (26°C). We propose methods to calibrate the total count without cooling device or compensation circuit. After operating the probe at room temperature, the first measured count is set as the reference value, and the correction factor is derived using the tendency of the count to decrease as the temperature increases. In addition, since this probe is used for environmental radiation monitoring, periodic measurements are more suitable than continuous measurements. Therefore, the temperature of the probe can be maintained by adding a power saving interval to the operation sequence of the probe. These two methods use the operation sequence and measurement data, respectively. Thus, it is expected to be the most effective method for the current system where the temperature compensation through hardware is not possible.
Most sensors are affected by temperature, so they are tested in advance and used for temperature compensation. However, sensor affected by the temperature hysteresis is not compensated. This is because even if compensation is made in the form of a general n-th polynomial, the effect of hysteresis remains the same. In this paper, a method of compensating accelerometer biases with hysteresis using a new parameter C was studied. This technique goes beyond finding the appropriate variable for compensation and is a method of creating the parameter itself with a combination of new variables. As a result, most errors could be eliminated.
A monitoring technique of ground anchor force is now studying by measuring the strains distributed on a bearing plate. These distributed strains are measured by a fiber optic OFDR (Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometer) sensor. A sensing optical fiber was attached on the bearing plate at the two radial locations and tested by a universal test machine. The anchor forces can be calculated from the differences of these two trains.