Grant: Engage Grants Program

Environmental Instruments Canada Inc. has identified an opportunity to develop low cost, rugged, small,unobtrusive, easy to use radiation detectors for first responders and general consumers. These radiationdetectors communicate with a smart phone or other mobile computing platform via a wireless Bluetoothconnection. This allows radiation exposure data to easily be displayed to the user and/or transmitted to a remotedata repository.Currently these portable, wireless radiation detectors use a Geiger-Mueller (GM) tube to detect gammaradiation. A GM tube can be somewhat fragile and requires a high voltage supply to operate. GM tubes alsohave low sensitivity per unit volume and do not detect neutrons. GM tubes do not provide any spectralinformation. Therefore they cannot be used for radionuclide identification.The project will develop a prototype gamma radiation detector using Multi Pixel Photon Counters (MPPCs)coupled to a selected scintillator, as simple gross counters in the place of GM tubes. As well, the suitability ofMPPCs in neutron detectors and spectrometers will be investigated. If these technologies can be adapted foruse in a portable, wireless radiation detector some of the limitations posed by using only GM tube detectortechnology could be overcome.This research direction complements efforts by the SPARRO Group at the University of Regina recentlyundertaken towards investigating commercial applications in the use of MPPCs in addition to the Group'scontinuing effort in researching and deploying such devices in experimental nuclear physics environments.