Performance of Higher Order Campbell methods, Part I: review and numerical convergence study

Journal article, 2016

This paper investigates, through numerical simulations, the performance of a signal analysis method by which a high temperature fission chamber can be used over a wide range of count rates. Results reported in a previous paper (Elter et al., 2015 [I]) indicated that the traditional Campbell method and the pulse mode cannot provide a sufficient overlap at medium count rates. Hence the use of the so-called Higher Order Campbell (HOC) methods is proposed and their performance is investigated. It is shown that the HOC methods can guarantee the linearity (i.e. correctness) of the neutron flux estimation over a wide count rate, even during transient conditions. The capabilities of these methods for suppressing parasitic noise (originating from various sources) are verified.