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AUTHOR(S):

Onyemaechi N. Ofodile, Matthew N. Agu

 

TITLE

Modelling the Recovery of Pulse Peak Pileup for Implementation in an FPGA for a Nuclear Spectroscopy System

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ABSTRACT

A major source of error in radiation measurement is the inaccurate instrument reading such as inaccurate radiation count rate that leads to inaccurate determination of activity of a source and hence, inaccurate values of exposure rate. Inaccurate count rate can be a direct consequence of pulse pileup. The current algorithms for dealing with pulse pileup are to identify pulses that have piled up on top of each other, reject that information, and then analyze only 'clean' pulses. This present work is based on the implementation of a mathematical model of linear equations from a matrix in both hardware and software formats. This implementation is in conjunction with Nelder-Mead direct search algorithm for peak search implementation in an FPGA based signal processing system for pulse pileup recovery. In the design, the FPGA subsystem can be implemented by either a hardware form using Matlab and Xilinx blocks or in a software form using a Mcode block. From the simulations, out of the incident pulses and applying the traditional approach, pileups occurred and only the “clean” pulses are recovered. In our approach, the peaks were detected and recovered up to 100% irrespective of their arrival times even in severe pileup situation as opposed to another work that recovered up to 65% of piled up pulses.

KEYWORDS

Dead Time, Detection, FPGA, Peak, Pileup, Recovery, State Machine, Spectroscopy, Zynq-7000

 

Cite this paper

Onyemaechi N. Ofodile, Matthew N. Agu. (2019) Modelling the Recovery of Pulse Peak Pileup for Implementation in an FPGA for a Nuclear Spectroscopy System. International Journal of Instrumentation and Measurement, 4, 1-8

 

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