BSA Design and Simulation of the Beam Characteristic for the Fast Neutron Radiography Based on a Compact Neutron Generator

Neutron radiography is an important nondestructive testing technique. It can be used to detect the explosive devices, drug and the nuclear fuel element, etc. A beam-shaping-assembly (BSA) based on a compact D-T neutron generator is designed for fast neutron radiography in this paper. D-T neutron source model is constructed based on the neutron energy spectrum and angular distribution data. The transportation of neutron and γ-ray in the BSA is simulated using MCNP4C code. The neutron fluence of the collimated neutron beam with respect to the neutron source of the unit source is 9.30×10-6 cm-2. The collimated neutron beams is mainly fast neutrons with energies greater than 10 MeV. In the irradiation field range with a diameter of 14 cm, the neutron fluence uniformity of the collimated beam is 4.3%, the ratio of the neutron fluence to the gamma fluence in the collimated beam is 17.20, and the neutron flux and the neutron fluence ratio (J/Φ) is 0.992 which indicates that the collimated neutron beam has good parallelism. The leakage neutron fluence in outside of BSA is two orders of magnitude lower than that of the collimated neutron beam. The designed BSA can meet the need of fast neutron radiography.