Improving the NAA laboratory pneumatic transfer system for using Tehran research reactor

Neutron activation analysis (NAA) is a precise multi-elemental method which performs well for qualitative and quantitative analyses. This method has been applied to the laboratory of Radiation Applications Research School (RARS) at University of Tehran. The new pneumatic transfer system (Rabbit) has been designed and constructed for transferring samples, in particular short half-life samples, to Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) core for NAA. With this system samples were transferred and returned to/from the reactor as fast as possible in both automatic and manual modes. This system has two distinct paths for sending and receiving with transfer time of 30 s to the reactor core and 36 s from the irradiation position to the counting station in NAA laboratory which is about 700 m from the laboratory. Experiment and calculation have been carried out for calibration of the neutron flux and spectrum.