Experimental detection of the hydrogen content in rock material by a pulsed neutron method

A pulsed neutron method to measure the water or hydrogen content in a rock material has been elaborated and tested on the experimental set-up at the fast neutron generator in the IFJ PAN (Kraków, Poland). A dedicated pulsed thermal neutron source has been designed, built and added to this set-up. The test experiments have been done using dry crumbled granite as the rock matrix. The hydrogen content in samples has varied through an addition of a defined amount of polyethylene. The time decay constant of the pulsed thermal neutron flux has been measured as a function of polyethylene content in the granite + polyethylene samples. The experimental results have been supplemented with Monte Carlo simulations of the experiments. Analytical estimations of the time decay constant in the examined geometry have also been done. Difficulties of the proposed experimental method at low values of the hydrogen content are discussed. The presented pulsed method to determine the hydrogen content, which is less than 10%, needs rock samples of volume about 3 dm3. For a higher hydrogen content the volume of the sample can be lower – about 0.7 dm3.