Scintillating Porous Architechtures for radioactive gas detection
Résumé
Radioactive gases are key targets for the environment, making gas monitoring an important issue. Funded within the Horizon 2020 FET-OPEN call, corresponding to the current Horizon Europe EIC Pathfinder action, the project SPARTE (https://www.sparte-project.eu) focuses on the detection and metrology of tracers related to nuclear activities. In this respect, the detection of 85Kr, 133Xe, 3H, 37Ar, being all electron or electron capture radionuclides, is targeted.
SPARTE project aims at implementing and achieving a radically novel radioactive gas detection and radioactivity metrology, by introducing highly porous scintillating aerogels and/or Metal-Organic Frameworks designed to dramatically extend gas-matter interaction for effective detection through scintillation. These materials after development and optimization aim at combining an efficient, fast and isotropic scintillation ensuring homogeneous 3D response and high sensitivity for metrology. The goal is to realize functional solid-based sensors generating a close intermixing between the sensor and the analyte and to combine efficiency and homogeneity targeting to obtain a real time detection sensor with a significantly improved sensitivity in an easy deployable system. Based on these new sensor families, measurement method will be tested for these isotopes with a particular focus on low activities.
In this presentation, the latest results obtained after 1.5 year of the project will be presented. It includes the development of two possible solutions, i.e. the nanoscintillator based aerogels and the Metal Organic Framework structures and the latest results obtained under radioactive gas exposure.