Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Mapping of Alpha-Emitting Radionuclides in the Environment Using an Unmanned Aircraft System

Pablo Royo
* ORCID logo ,
Arturo Vargas
,
Tania Guillot Colls
,
David Saiz
,
Jonathan Pichel Carrera
,
Daniel Rabago
ORCID logo ,
María Amor Duch
,
Claudia Grossi
ORCID logo ,
Maksym Luchkov
,
Volker Dangendorf
,
Faton Krasniqi
Version 1 : Received: 25 October 2023 / Approved: 25 October 2023 / Online: 26 October 2023 (14:53:52 CEST)
Version 2 : Received: 20 December 2023 / Approved: 21 December 2023 / Online: 21 December 2023 (16:02:51 CET)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Royo, P.; Vargas, A.; Guillot, T.; Saiz, D.; Pichel, J.; Rábago, D.; Duch, M.A.; Grossi, C.; Luchkov, M.; Dangendorf, V.; et al. The Mapping of Alpha-Emitting Radionuclides in the Environment Using an Unmanned Aircraft System. Remote Sensing 2024, 16, 848, doi:10.3390/rs16050848. Royo, P.; Vargas, A.; Guillot, T.; Saiz, D.; Pichel, J.; Rábago, D.; Duch, M.A.; Grossi, C.; Luchkov, M.; Dangendorf, V.; et al. The Mapping of Alpha-Emitting Radionuclides in the Environment Using an Unmanned Aircraft System. Remote Sensing 2024, 16, 848, doi:10.3390/rs16050848.

Abstract

The protection of first responders from radioactive contamination that may result from a radiological accident is of great importance and complexity. The complexity of detecting and quantifying such radioactive contamination is very high when it comes to the dispersion of alpha-emitting radionuclides in the environment. This work presents the development of an un-manned aerial monitoring system that integrates an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) and a novel optical alpha radioluminescence detection system to scan and obtain information about the alpha-emitting radionuclides contaminated area on a 3D map. This manuscript describes a flexible hardware and software architecture for optical detection of alpha-emitting sources. The UAS is equipped with 4G/LTE air-ground communications and onboard computation to geolocate and send to the ground control station (GCS) the measured data in real-time and thus react to any anomaly detected during the mission. A GCS has also been developed for the correct visualization of the radioactive samples in a 3D map. This article shows the results obtained from the calibration of the detector in the laboratory as well as from the different flights performed on UV LEDs and a 100 MBq 241Am source to demonstrate the feasibility of the system in a realistic scenario.

Keywords

radiological detection; alpha-emitting radionuclides; UAS software architecture; UAS

Subject

Environmental and Earth Sciences, Remote Sensing

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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