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Characterization of a new tissue equivalent proportional counter for dosimetry of neutron and photon fields: comparison of measurements and Monte Carlo simulations

The tissue equivalent proportional counter (TEPC) is widely recognized as an important dosimetric technique particularly for complex radiation fields. The Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) has recently developed a new spherical TEPC to monitor the space radiation environment in the low earth orbit. The purpose of this study is to examine the performance of the TEPC against standard photon (137Cs) and neutron (252Cf) sources through ground-based measurements and Monte Carlo simulations prior to its actual implementation. Lineal energy distributions, microdosimetric spectra and dosimetric quantities for a 2 µm simulated site in pure propane gas were determined for both sources. Both the measured and calculated 137Cs spectra were shown to occur below 11 keV µm−1 that is the typical range covered by photon sources. Complete coincidence of their electron edge regions was also observed. Meanwhile, the proton edge from the measured 252Cf spectra was found to be in good agreement with those from the simulated ones and the literature. The gamma, recoil proton and heavy ions peaks expected for neutron sources were well defined, albeit deviations in the gamma region. The absorbed dose and dose equivalent for both irradiation conditions were also successfully obtained. The dose equivalent for 252Cf was found to be ten times the absorbed dose whereas it remained the same for 137Cs. The discrepancies observed in the low lineal energy region for both irradiation conditions were caused by intrinsic limitations on the experimental set-up and simulation configurations. This mainly contributed to a difference in the measured and calculated dose mean lineal energies of about 4.1% and 8.7% for the photon and neutron cases, respectively. Nevertheless, fair consistency with published data suggested that our TEPC could adequately reproduce the expected microdosimetric distributions for complex radiation fields.