THE STAND-ALONE ADAM, A NETWORK OPTION FOR UNATTENDED RADIATION MONITORING

The IAEA has identified a need to carry out Unattended Radiation Monitoring (URM) over a network using standard Ethernet technology. With this in mind, BOT Engineering, with the support of the Canadian Safeguards Support Program, has developed the Stand-alone ADAM. The Standalone ADAM is a remotely accessible data acquisition system that can be adapted to a variety of unattended radiation monitoring tasks. The counter timer section of the Stand-alone ADAM is the well established Autonomous Data Acquisition Module (ADAM), developed for the VIFM system which uses the VXI bus standard. Due to incorporation of the existing ADAM module in its design, inputs from a variety of radiation detectors can be captured. The new Stand-alone package includes an Ethernet connection and battery back-up. Web server hardware and software have been integrated with the ADAM, which can now be accessed using standard network protocols. The data may be accessed from a Stand-alone ADAM using the current release of the VIFM Application. The VIFM Application provides various control functions including the ability to routinely synchronize Stand-alone ADAM clocks. A suitably programmed non-VIFM collect computer can also access the data via CGI (Common Gateway Interface) calls. This feature makes the Stand-alone ADAM a versatile option as a data generator for a variety of un-attended radiation monitoring roles both in safeguards and other roles. A standard HTML browser may also be used to access the data. The paper includes an overview of the Stand-alone ADAM’s technical features and a review of potential URM applications.