Principle component analysis for radiotracer signal separation

•Radiotracer experiments have been carried out using PMSCR-MK2 flow rig.•Method for separating Tc99m and Ba137m radiotracer signals has been proposed.•Radioactive decay&background corrections and signal denoising have been performed.•Time domain, ICA, and PCA based separation algorithms have been carried out.•The results proved superiority of PCA separation to other separation algorithms.

Radiotracers can be used in several industrial applications by injecting the radiotracer into the industrial system and monitoring the radiation using radiation detectors for obtaining signals. These signals are analyzed to obtain indications about what is happening within the system or to determine the problems that may be present in the system. For multi-phase system analysis, more than one radiotracer is used and the result is a mixture of radiotracers signals. The problem is in such cases is how to separate these signals from each other. The paper presents a proposed method based on Principle Component Analysis (PCA) for separating mixed two radiotracer signals from each other. Two different radiotracers (Technetium-99m (Tc99m) and Barium-137m (Ba137m)) were injected into a physical model for simulation of chemical reactor (PMSCR-MK2) for obtaining the radiotracer signals using radiation detectors and Data Acquisition System (DAS). The radiotracer signals are mixed and signal processing steps are performed include background correction and signal de-noising, then applying the signal separation algorithms. Three separation algorithms have been carried out; time domain based separation algorithm, Independent Component Analysis (ICA) based separation algorithm, and Principal Components Analysis (PCA) based separation algorithm. The results proved the superiority of the PCA based separation algorithm to the other based separation algorithm, and PCA based separation algorithm and the signal processing steps gives a considerable improvement of the separation process.