Federal Office for Radiation Protection, Medical and Occupational Radiation Protection, Ingolstädter Landstraße 1, 85764, Oberschleißheim, Germany.
Radiat Environ Biophys. 2022 Aug;61(3):391-398. doi: 10.1007/s00411-022-00987-1. Epub 2022 Jul 14.
Rod sources are a common tool for the calibration of whole-body counters in combination with the Saint-Petersburg brick phantom. Here, a method for the production of such sources in ordinary radiochemical laboratories is presented. The rod sources consist of a tubular capsule of rigid polyvinyl chloride with a radioactive filling of epoxy resin. The method allows the production of rod sources at material costs of about 1 € per rod source and of ten rod sources by one person per day. Quality-assurance measurements were performed regarding the spatial distribution of the activity within the rod sources and the distribution of the activity throughout a set of sources. The relative double standard deviation of the activities of five different segments of single rod sources was 7.1%. The relative double standard deviation within a set of 90 rod sources was 2.8% after those 11% of sources with the greatest deviation from the arithmetic mean were discarded. Tests according to ISO 2919 to certify the rod sources as sealed sources of Class 2 of this standard were successfully conducted. The bending test proved to be the most critical test for the rod sources; the sources were broken by a mass of 12-14 kg, which is only slightly more than the stipulated mass of 10.2 kg. The presented method allows for a cost- and labour-effective production of sealed radioactive rod sources and thus facilitates the application of the Saint-Petersburg brick phantom for calibrations and interlaboratory comparisons of whole-body counters.
棒源是与圣彼得堡砖体模型结合使用来校准全身计数器的常用工具。本文提出了一种在普通放射化学实验室中生产此类源的方法。棒源由带有放射性环氧树脂填充的刚性聚氯乙烯管状胶囊组成。该方法允许在材料成本方面，每个棒源的成本约为 1 欧元，每天由一个人生产十个棒源。对棒源内活性物质的空间分布和一组源内活性物质的分布进行了质量保证测量。五个不同棒源段活性的相对双标准偏差为 7.1%。剔除了 11%偏离算术平均值最大的源后，90 个棒源一组的相对双标准偏差为 2.8%。按照 ISO 2919 进行的认证棒源为该标准 2 类密封源的测试获得成功。弯曲测试被证明是对棒源最关键的测试；棒源在 12-14 公斤的质量下破裂，这仅略高于规定的 10.2 公斤质量。本文提出的方法可以实现经济高效地生产密封放射性棒源，从而促进圣彼得堡砖体模型在全身计数器校准和实验室间比较中的应用。
