Discover Top Posts Tagged with #scintillators

AFIT doctoral student builds custom 3D printer to produce radiation detectors for USAF

Additive manufacturing offers faster, lower-cost path to complex scintillator geometries

A project sponsored by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Research and Development (NNSA DNN R&D) program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has applied additive manufacturing to the production of pixelated plastic scintillator arrays — devices used to detect and distinguish between neutrons and gamma rays. Chandler Moore, a doctoral student at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT), part of Air University, led the institute’s contribution to the project. Moore designed, built, and programmed a custom 3D printer capable of producing pixelated scintillator arrays from scratch. Scintillators are a class of radiation detector that emit light when struck by ionizing radiation — energy invisible to the human eye but tracked for national security purposes.

“I have been told that the material is BC 408 (although I can not confirm this) and as you can see in the photo, it responds to UV light.“

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Novel molecular design achieves 1,300-fold increase in scintillator radioluminescence

Scientists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a highly effective and general molecular design that enables an enhancement in radioluminescence within organometallic scintillators by more than three orders of magnitude. This enhancement harnesses X-ray-induced triplet exciton recycling within lanthanide metal complexes. Detection of ionizing radiation is crucial in diverse fields, such as medical radiography, environmental monitoring and astronomy. As a result, significant efforts have been dedicated to the development of luminescent materials that respond to X-rays. However, current high-performance scintillators are almost exclusively limited to ceramic and perovskite materials, which face issues such as complex manufacturing processes, environmental toxicity, self-absorption and stability problems.

Researchers have developed a battery that can convert nuclear energy into electricity via light emission, a study suggests.

Researchers have developed a battery that can convert nuclear energy into electricity via light emission, a new study suggests. Nuclear power plants, which generate about 20% of all electricity produced in the United States, produce almost no greenhouse gas emissions. However, these systems do create radioactive waste, which can be dangerous to human health and the environment. Safely disposing of this waste can be challenging. Using a combination of scintillator crystals, high-density materials that emit light when they absorb radiation, and solar cells, the team, led by researchers from The Ohio State University, demonstrated that ambient gamma radiation could be harvested to produce a strong enough electric output to power microelectronics, like microchips.

From thin to bulk: Affordable, brighter and faster scanning with high-energy radiation sources

Imagine a medical scanner that works faster and produces clearer images, or a radiation detector that pinpoints tiny traces of radioactive material with unprecedented accuracy. These futuristic possibilities are a step closer to reality thanks to new research by scientists at the Łukasiewicz Research Network—PORT Polish Center for Technology Development. In a publication in Advanced Materials, they reveal how they've scaled up a new type of light-emitting material—known as a scintillator—by embedding it with nano-engineered metallic structures, unlocking performance previously thought unattainable in bulk materials. Scintillators are special substances that emit visible light when exposed to high-energy radiation such as X-rays or gamma rays. They are critical in numerous fields—from medical imaging and security screening to high-energy physics experiments. But traditional scintillators have limitations: They often emit weak signals or respond slowly, making them less efficient for demanding applications.

Scintillating science: Researchers improve materials for radiation detection and imaging technology

A team of Florida State University researchers has further developed a new generation of organic-inorganic hybrid materials that can improve image quality in X-ray machines, CT scans and other radiation detection and imaging technologies.

Professor Biwu Ma from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and his colleagues have developed a new class of materials that can act as highly efficient scintillators, which emit light after being exposed to other forms of high energy radiations, such as X-rays.

The team's most recent study, published in Advanced Materials, is an improvement upon their previous research to develop better scintillators. The new design concept produces materials that can emit light within nanoseconds, orders of magnitude faster than previously developed materials, allowing for better imaging.

"Reducing the radioluminescence decay lifetime of scintillators to nanoseconds is an important breakthrough," Ma said. "Using a hybrid material made up of both organic and inorganic components means each component can be used for the part of the process where it is most effective."

Safer X-Rays: Improved Scintillators for More Sensitive X-Ray Imaging

Improvements in the material that converts X-rays into light, for medical or industrial images, could allow a tenfold signal enhancement.

Scintillators are materials that emit light when bombarded with high-energy particles or X-rays. In medical or dental X-ray systems, they convert incoming X-ray radiation into visible light that can then be captured using film or photosensors. They’re also used for night-vision systems and for research, such as in particle detectors or electron microscopes.

Researchers at MIT have now shown how one could improve the efficiency of scintillators by at least tenfold, and perhaps even a hundredfold, by changing the material’s surface to create certain nanoscale configurations, such as arrays of wave-like ridges. While past attempts to develop more efficient scintillators have focused on finding new materials, the new approach could in principle work with any of the existing materials.

Though it will require more time and effort to integrate their scintillators into existing X-ray machines, the team believes that this method might lead to improvements in medical diagnostic X-rays or CT scans, to reduce dose exposure and improve image quality. In other applications, such as X-ray inspection of manufactured parts for quality control, the new scintillators could enable inspections with higher accuracy or at faster speeds.

Organic polymeric scintillators excite the X-ray community

X-ray detection is of great importance in diverse applications, such as radiation detection, medical diagnosis, and security inspection. A popular way to achieve X-ray detection is to integrate a photodetector with a luminescent material called a scintillator, which emits energy in the form of light. Scintillators can convert high-energy X-ray photons to low-energy visible luminescence.

Presently, X-ray scintillators commonly use inorganic materials or heavy metal complexes. These scintillators perform well but have several intrinsic disadvantages, including toxicity, harsh preparation conditions, and the high cost of rare metal resources. Developing new designs for efficient, metal-free X-ray scintillators is challenging, yet it is widely recognized that pure organic scintillators offer distinct advantages over inorganic: They are low-cost, flexible, and easy to prepare. Still, recent progress in efficient radioluminescence has mainly focused on small molecules, or monomers, which are inevitably associated with processability and repeatability issues.

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