Inspecting the Inside of Sunken Ships and Ship’s Underwater Hull

In order to demonstrate the possibility of identifying the material within ship’s underwater hull, sunken ships, or other objects on the sea fl oor, tests with a 14 MeV sealed tube neutron generator incorporated inside a small submarine were performed in the test basin fi lled with sea water. The results obtained for inspection of diesel fuel and explosive presence behind single and double hull structures are presented

Development of the quality assurance/quality control procedures for a neutron interrogation system

In order to perform Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) procedures for a system dedicated to the neutron interrogation of objects for the presence of threat materials one needs to perform measurements of reference materials (RM) i.e. simulants having the same (or similar) atomic ratios as real materials. It is well known that explosives, drugs, and various other benign materials, contain chemical elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen in distinctly different quantities. For example, a high carbon-to-oxygen ratio (C/O) is characteristic of drugs. Explosives can be differentiated by measurement of both (C/O) and nitrogen-to-oxygen (N/O) ratios. The C/N ratio of the chemical warfare agents, coupled with the measurement of elements such as fluorine and phosphorus, clearly differentiate them from the conventional explosives. Here we present the RM preparation, calibration procedure and correlations attained between theoretical values and experimentally obtained results in laboratory conditions for C/O and N/C ratios of prepared hexogen (RDX), TNT, DLM2, TATP, cocaine, heroin, yperite, tetranitromethane, peroxide methylethylketone, nitromethane and ethyleneglycol dinitrate simulants. We have shown that analyses of the gamma ray spectra by using simple unfolding model developed for this purpose gave a nice agreement with the chemical formula of created simulants, thus the calibration quality was successfully tested

Indications for Synergetic and Antagonistic Effects between Trace Elements in The Environment to Human Health

The objective of this work was to investigate the interactions between the level of concentrations of Ca, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Ni, Cu, Zn, As and Pb in potable water, soil, vegetation and school children hair and disease incidences of neoplasms, diseases of the blood and blood-forming organs and certain disorders involving the immune mechanism, endocrine, nutritional and metabolic diseases, mental and behavioral disorders and diseases of the circulatory system on the population groups which are homogeneously exposed to the environmental conditions. It was found that potable water among the other investigated aspects of the physical environment has the greatest impact on the public health. The environment- disease incidence interactions have been found for all investigated diseases groups. The results reported here emphasize the importance of the observation of the mutual effects of the environmental variables on the human health for the identification of their synergetic as well as antagonistic effects