Small-area Portable Resistive Plate Chambers for Muography

Muography is finding applications in various domains such as volcanology, archaeology, civil engineering, industry, mining, and nuclear waste surveys. To simplify transportation and installation in remote locations after laboratory testing, a fully portable and autonomous muon telescope based on Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) is being developed. Two glass-RPC prototypes have been created, sharing the same design goals but with different detector parameters, and comparative studies are ongoing. Drawing from prototype experience, a double-gap RPC with advanced features and improved spatial resolution is constructed. Resistive electrodes are produced manually, and a new data acquisition board is currently undergoing calibration. The results on prototype performance, readout board comparisons and the technical progress on the double-gap RPC are presented

Development of single gap resistive plate chamber detectors for muography

Muography (i.e., muon radiography or muon tomography) is an imaging technique that uses cosmic muons as a radiation source. Conceptually, it is similar to common radiography, but instead of X-ray photons, muons are used. Muons are produced when primary cosmic rays interact with the upper atmosphere, and their flux at sea level can be used in the imaging of a target volume. This imaging technique determines the density of a structure of interest by measuring the flux of muons passing through it. Muography has a diverse range of applications, such as geology, archaeology, civil engineering, nuclear reactor monitoring, nuclear waste characterization, underground surveys, etc. Muons can be detected using various detector technologies, among which resistive plate chambers (RPC) are a very cost-effective choice. RPCs are planar detectors that use ionization in a thin gas gap to detect cosmic muons. We are developing a mini-RPC-based muon detector for muography, which we called the "Muoscope". The specialty of this project is that the full setup of the system, including the detectors, data acquisition system, and power supply system, is portable. And since it is small compared to most detectors used in muography and is autonomous, it has a variety of applications. This thesis describes the development of air-tight RPC detectors and the characterization of different parameters of the RPC for high detector efficiencies.(SC - Sciences) -- UCL, 202