From August 26 -30, NSSPI faculty member Dr. Craig Marianno and Dr. Sunil Khatri from the TAMU Department of Electrical Engineering, along with NSSPI graduate students Matthew Grypp and Gentry Hearn, traveled to the Port of Tacoma to conduct gamma measurement experiments at the port’s Rail Test Center. This work is part of the multi-disciplinary SHIELD (Smuggled HEU Interdiction through Enhanced anaLysis and Detection) project, and the data collected will aid researchers in developing detector systems to be used in border monitoring, specifically in detecting radiological materials in shipping containers arriving at U.S. ports.
At the Port of Tacoma, radiation detectors were attached to a spreader bar crane, and measurements were taken for 24 hours while the crane unloaded a ship. The acquisition software and detector pods used to obtain the measurements were created by NSSPI students, and the data will be analyzed to determine minimum detectable activities for crane mounted systems.