Patent ID: 9557423
Date: 2017-01-31
CPC Classifications: G01T,G21C,Y02E

Claim:
1. A neutron detector, comprising: a pressure vessel having a pressurized gas mixture of CF an electrically conductive field cage assembly within the pressure vessel, the field cage assembly being configured and operative to establish first and second electric field regions in the pressure vessel, the first electric field region being a relatively large drift region of relatively low field strength in which ionization electrons generated by neutron-He interactions are directed toward the second electric field region, the second electric field region being a substantially smaller region of substantially higher field strength at the second end of the pressure vessel in which the ionization electrons undergo avalanche multiplication resulting in scintillation of the CF an imaging subsystem including (1) a camera at the optically transparent window of the first end of the pressure vessel, the camera being operative in response to scintillation light from the amplification region to generate camera output signals representative of a sequence of images captured by the camera, and (2) an image processor operative to process the camera output signals in real time to (a) identify the scintillation tracks and (b) based on the identification of the scintillation tracks, estimate a rate and direction of incident neutrons.