Silver Activation

[Jack Puntawong]

Hello,

I think I am on the verge of producing my first neutron so I'm getting everything prepare before I feed in the deuterium. One of the method I am considering is silver activation but I have a couple of questions:

1. Richard mention in the FAQs that the activation process should be done with silver foil/leafs not bar. Why is this so ? I thought that the thicker the material, the higher chance that neutron would be capture.

2. I can easily purchase 99.99% 4x4 cm silver leafs from a local temple (It cost like 10 cents per leaf). However, the thickness is like 1 micron thick. Is this thick enough ?

3. How long do you guys typically run your fusor for silver activation ? If possible, as reference material, please provide the output of your fusor in neutron/second too.

Thanks!

Kunakorn (Jack) Puntawong

[JakeJHecla]

I would strongly recommend against using Ag activation for early tests. If you run some back of the envelope calculations on activation, you'll find this method is only viable for fusors making north of 50-60k neutrons/sec. It's certainly doable at lower fluxes, but it's more effort than it's worth. You end up using lots of shielding, transferring samples very quickly and doing lots of math on the result. Take a look here http://www.wise-uranium.org/rnac.html and plug in some neutron flux values you would expect from your setup (depends on minimum distance to the poissor) to get a feel for what I'm talking about.

Very nice setup, I'm excited to see the results!

[George Schmermund]

Low yield can often be countered with high sensitivity. You might want to consider the eponymous Schmermund Cell! It's cheap, easy to construct, and very sensitive.

viewtopic.php?f=13&t=6245


Construction details are here: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=6253

[Jack Puntawong]

Jake,
Thank your for you assessment. I was only thinking of Silver activation because it involves the equipments that ,I know, work. I have the GE B-10 tube and Steven's Gamma Spectrometry sound card. However, I am not sure whether I can borrow a neutron source from a university to calibrate. I have contacted a Nuclear Engineering Department at a National University whether they can help me with the neutron detection. Hopefully, they'll reply me back today. Thank you for the link!

George,
I didn't know you are an inventor! I am in Thailand right now so shipping from either ebay or amazon is expensive and time consuming. Also, the silver I got from the temple is extremely thin (like the thickness of the gold foil they uses in spa treatment). I'll consider producing one of your cell once I'm back in the States. Thanks!