Year
2011
Abstract
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) next-generation Non-Destructive Assay (NDA) instrument, referred to as the Universal NDA Data Acquisition Platform or UNAP, is in the final stages of development and testing at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The UNAP development is a joint effort between LANL, Canberra, the IAEA and Pelowitz LLC. LANL is responsible for the development of the data acquisition hardware and firmware which includes three high speed multiplicity shift registers, eight scalars which double as an eight-channel derandomizer, two femto-ammeters, four Single Channel Analyzers (SCA), one Analog to Digital Converter (ADC), one 4-20mA control signal input, four discrete digital inputs and four contact closure outputs. The UNAP instrument will be the IAEA’s standard attended and unattended NDA instrument, replacing instruments such as the Advanced Multiplicity Shift Register (AMSR), the JSR-12 and the MiniGrand. The UNAP is a Compact Peripheral Component Interface (cPCI) based instrument with a commercial cPCI processor board. The instrument includes three 100BaseT Ethernet interfaces through an internal switch, three USB ports, an RS-232 port and has 16 GBytes of internal memory. While the new instrument uses Ethernet as its primary interface, the RS-232 port enables interchangeability with existing instruments. This allows backward compatibility with the AMSR and MiniGrand. The instrument also includes two high voltage power supplies for biasing external detectors along with a dedicated low voltage power supply to provide controlled and monitored power to external electronics such as preamplifiers. This paper will describe the UNAP functions, the data acquisition performance characteristics and the preliminary test results.