Phase-3
This phase was most challenging and important in the design of RPT system and it had many stages:
1. Literature review to get required information on Mone-Carlo simulation and how detector efficiency can be calculated by it. I reviewed many articles related to engineering physics and also published works of researchers who have modeled this kind of system before (Altough my instruments were different and I was modelling Conical Geometry, which had never been done before). I also got in contact with an Indian working at University of Washington St. Loius' and he provided me with some sources of information. Hence, I was able to get almost all the information needed to do the modelling.
2. To choose a good Random Number generator. Randon Number generator plays a very important role in Monte-Carlo simulation and if Random Numbers are not truely random (they have some correlation between them) it will result in error in the simulation. I used Random Number generators from Numerical Recipies which can generate 1.6 million numbers without any correlation.
3. To create a computer code to perform the simulation. This was the last and the hardest part for me as I am not a Computer Engineer and had little experience in software development but somehow I survived :)
And I was ready to go, the results started to make sense after few adjustments and I was elated by it till I hit a roadblock in my next phase.
Phase-4
The last phase is (as its not over yet) to link the instruments (Scintillation Detectors and MCA) with my computer code and run the experiments to get final results. I was planning to use software provided by Ortec (Maestro) to do that but as I tried to use it, I found that it was of no use for my work. It could not count the Gamma rays recorded by Detector in specified time interval, all it can do was to analyze Gamma ray spectrum which was of no use to me. Hence, my work was stopped completely for one month. The data given by Detectors was in binary files and I had no idea how to decode them and how to interact with the instruments to record the type of data I wanted. My supervisor Dr. Todd Pugsley then stepped in and he introduced me to Dr. Rob Pywell of Engineering Physics and he helped me to develop my own software to overcome this problem. After 2 months of meetings, discussions and hard work we were finally able to solve the problem and now we have successfully conducted our first experiment. I know that there will be many more problems as I try to decode and analyze the data but I am sure I will overcome them as I did before. If you are interested in my story, keep visiting my site, I will keep you posted.
Thanks for reading...
