Accelerated Testing

Facilities

           The Radiation Science and Engineering Center (RSEC) at The Pennsylvania State University will serve as our test facility. It includes the Penn State Breazeale Reactor (PSBR), gamma irradiation facilities (In-pool Irradiator, Dry Irradiator and Hot Cells) and various radiation detection and measurement laboratories. The PSBR, which first went critical in 1955, is the nation's longest continuously operating university research reactor. The PSBR is a 1 MW, TRIGA (Training, Research, Isotopes, General Atomics) nuclear reactor with moveable core in a large pool and with pulsing capabilities. The core is located in a 24 ft deep pool with ~71,000 gallons of demineralized water.
 

TEST SETUP

The facilities available at RSEC namely the ability to operate at multiple power levels, pulse the reactor to get an extremely high power range and isolate the thermal and fast neutron flux, will help us characterize the soft error rate effectively. The fast neutron spectrum is currently being calibrated. The upper energy limit of fast neutron flux from the reactor is less than the atmosphere neutrons spectrum, but it corresponds to the dominant portion of the atmosphere neutron flux.

Two different set of experiments are envisioned. One set of experiments will be performed using the neutron flux obtained at the beam ports after the heavy water tanks. This neutron beam has thermal neutrons as the dominant portion of the flux. Currently, we are testing commercially available SRAM chips at this port. The other set of experiments will be performed using the large flux of fast neutrons available at the reactor core. Picture on the right shows the test setup and the reactor core.

Figure 2. Test Setup

The results are given in the Results section.

* This work is supported in part by NSF Award # 0454123