Grant: Engage Grants Program

A preliminary automatic control system for the CANBERRA gas filling station of Geiger Mueller (GM) detectors is to be designed and implemented through LabView. The CANBERRA GM pancake detector allows detection of alpha, low energy beta and gamma radiation, which is very important in the nuclear industry and other areas where radiation level is of concern. Inert gas is filled in the detector using a gas filling station for its proper function. The current CANBERRA gas filling process encompasses eleven steps, and all of them are operated manually. Due to different levels of operating skill and expertise of the operators, there is inconsistency in quality of the final products. The purpose of this research is to automate the gas filling process to the largest extent possible, so as to address the inconsistency issue. Meanwhile, the automatic control system is expected to speed up the gas filling process. To achieve these goals, the steps that are feasible for automation among the eleven steps will be identified first. After this, automatic control systems for the identified steps will be designed as individual functional blocks, which will then be connected together to represent the overall operating process. Necessary testing of the individual control functions will be carried out in the laboratory by building a testing bench. The overall gas filling process and the automatic control functions will be demonstrated in the LabView simulation environment at the end of this project. Once it is successful, another NSERC CRD proposal will be prepared to secure necessary hardware interface cards, which can be used to physically connect the control systems designed through this project, to the physical gas filling station. It is expected that this project will not only benefit CANBERRA Co. economically, but also protect the general public through improved radiation detection technology.