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How to Build a Home-Brew Radon Detector: Measure Radiation with a Webcam

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11–15 of 15 posts

Re: How to Build a Home-Brew Radon Detector: Measure Radiation with a Webcam

#11
post #3

How do you know the hits aren't cosmic rays? It seems a few hits per hour could easily be cosmic rays, unless they are distinguishable somehow.

I'm more than a little skeptical of this. While it is all correct in principle--a webcam CCD target can certainly detect alphas, and electrostatic fields can sweep charged particles into a detector--the details are problematic, and there's no actual demonstration of the sensitivity of the device.

A typical camera target is about 3 mm on a side, for a total sensitive area of ~1e-5 m2. The muon flux at sea level is about 1 per cm2 per second, or 36 million per m2 per hour, or 360 hits per hour on a camera target, so even granted that the "active" area of the target is only a few percent of the physical area, muons more than account for the signal he is seeing, and muons deposit a lot of energy.

The electostatic concentrator is an interesting feature. Charged nuclei typically attach themselves to dust motes in the air, which are then swept along by the E-field. It isn't clear why he needs such high voltages to get 50 V/m over a few centimetres, and in my experience Cockroft-Walton generators are easy to build but hard to make work. With such tiny capacitors any stray leakage current would destroy the effect, and he does not anywhere measure the voltage produced.

The enhancement of the count rate could be accounted for by electrical noise from the CW driver circuit.

This is pure speculation on my part, based on a good deal of experience designing and building radiation detectors, but I'd like to see a lot more evidence before I said this was an effective radon detector.

An alternative, easier to debug and demonstrate, and more likely to work approach would be to use a commercially available activated zinc sulphide sheet with the camera target as the detector: http://www.eljentechnology.com/index.php/products/zinc-sulfi...

Re: How to Build a Home-Brew Radon Detector: Measure Radiation with a Webcam

#12
post #3

How do you know the hits aren't cosmic rays? It seems a few hits per hour could easily be cosmic rays, unless they are distinguishable somehow.

I'm more than a little skeptical of this. While it is all correct in principle--a webcam CCD target can certainly detect alphas, and electrostatic fields can sweep charged particles into a detector--the details are problematic, and there's no actual demonstration of the sensitivity of the device. A typical camera target is about 3 mm on a side, for a total sensitive area of ~1e-5 m 2. The muon flux at sea level is ab…

The author's conference paper [0] has more details, although not enough to remove all the doubts.

But I guess the main goal of the article is to show that, even though "radiation detector" sounds like a complicated thing to most people, or at least requiring some nontrivial components, it is actually possible to get started with DIY experimentation with very few and simple components and little effort. You might indeed get better results with ZnS:Ag phosphor sheets, but by showing that it is possible to build at least something with just a webcam that people already have you massively increase the likelihood that the reader actually starts to build and experiment. And when people already start experimenting, then many of these potential problems get incrementally noticed, figured out, and removed, and all kinds of cool projects can result. But yes, it would, indeed, have been nice if the article would have provided more information about testing the detector against various potential interferences and problems.

[0] http://spie.org/Publications/Proceedings/Paper/10.1117/12.20... (paywalled, though)

Re: How to Build a Home-Brew Radon Detector: Measure Radiation with a Webcam

#13
It's probably worth mentioning that some states offer free or discounted radon test kits. If you live in an area with elevated radon levels, you should look into getting your home tested.

Discovering that your home has too much radon in it isn't disastrous either. Homes can be retrofitted with proper ventilation to lower radon levels to safe amounts.

Re: How to Build a Home-Brew Radon Detector: Measure Radiation with a Webcam

#14
post #10
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agree, this device looks like it can detect any alpha radioactivity regardless of what is emitting it. edit: re-reading I found this "In order to make it more sensitive, I added an electrostatic concentrator to capture one of radon’s alpha-particle-emitting daughter products"

Alpha radiation from outer space can't penetrate the atmosphere, for much the same reason you can't fire bullets 1km underwater from the surface. The only source of alphas from cosmic radiation would be from some sort of indirect effects such as direct fissioning (at ground level) of a nuclide by cosmic radiation into an alpha + daughter.

I never talked about cosmic radiation but alpha radiations in general.

Re: How to Build a Home-Brew Radon Detector: Measure Radiation with a Webcam

#15
post #3

How do you know the hits aren't cosmic rays? It seems a few hits per hour could easily be cosmic rays, unless they are distinguishable somehow.

I'm more than a little skeptical of this. While it is all correct in principle--a webcam CCD target can certainly detect alphas, and electrostatic fields can sweep charged particles into a detector--the details are problematic, and there's no actual demonstration of the sensitivity of the device. A typical camera target is about 3 mm on a side, for a total sensitive area of ~1e-5 m 2. The muon flux at sea level is ab…

While I share your skepticism regarding the numbers quoted by the original article, a few remarks about the cosmic muons:

I think you are overestimating the cosmic muon flux quite a bit, see the particle data book for the discussion of cosmic muons.

http://pdg.lbl.gov/2012/reviews/rpp2012-rev-cosmic-rays.pdf (page 5)

Also ionization loss by fast muons is pretty low, it's in the "minimum ionizing particle" regime, and most cosmic muons we see "down here" are in the >1GeV/c area.

http://pdg.lbl.gov/2013/reviews/rpp2012-rev-passage-particle... (page 4 is muons on Copper)

But again, I think your doubts about the numbers is certainly warranted. With a experimental setup needing such a long exposure time to yield statistically usable numbers, I think one cannot really prove a lot. Certainly a detector more suitable to the task of counting radioactive decay, such as a calibrated large-volume geiger counter, would be better. At least one should run both setups in parallel for an extended period of time to be able to do cross-corralations.

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