Studies on neutron spectrum characterization for the Pneumatic Fast Transfer System (PFTS) of KAMINI reactor

•Determination of sub-cadmium to epithermal neutron flux ratio & the epithermal neutron flux shape factor.•Neutron spectrum characterization using multi-foil irradiation method.•High resolution gamma-ray spectrometry for the determination of reaction rates and saturated activities.•Generation of guess spectrum using Transport Monte Carlo Code.•Neutron spectrum unfolding by least square minimization approach.

Characterization of neutron energy spectrum along with the determination of sub-cadmium to epithermal neutron flux ratio (f) and the epithermal neutron flux shape factor (α) has been carried out at pneumatic fast transfer system (PFTS) of KAMINI reactor. The facility has been extensively used for the neutron activation analysis (NAA) studies using both k0-NAA and relative method. This paper describes the multi-foil activation method to determine the reaction rates followed by the generation of computed guess spectrum to unfold the neutron spectrum using least square minimization approach.