Engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility have announced the development of new shielding materials to protect sensitive electronics from damage in high-radiation environments such as nuclear power plants, particle accelerators and medical applications.
According to Jefferson engineers Paul Brindza and Bert Metzger, the three new materials—a lightweight concrete that is four times better at slowing down neutrons than ordinary concrete; a boron-rich concrete that absorbs neutrons using less material; and a thin, boron-rich paneling for use in space-restricted areas—form a cohesive system that is slimmer, less expensive and easier to make than existing shielding technologies.
The new shielding materials are especially useful for the researchers at Jefferson Lab who routinely study subatomic particles such as protons, neutrons and electrons because they are ideal for shielding the computers used to operate laboratory equipment and collect and transmit data from these particles during experiments.
“Getting rid of all the rest of the radiation is pretty easy, but the neutrons are very difficult, and they prove to be the thing that is dangerous not only to the electronics, but also to the software that runs the electronics. We wanted to do a little better job shielding, so we came up with a series of new products,” Brindza said.
“The stuff we made, any concrete company can pour it. We did a lot of work and engineering to make a product that anybody could dump into place and form up.”
Currently the new concrete mix is being used to build the shield house of a large, rotating particle spectrometer known as the Super High Momentum Spectrometer (SHMS). This device is one several new pieces of experimental equipment that are part of the laboratory’s 12 GeV upgrade. The shield house will reportedly protect the SHMS’ detector systems and an electronics room.
