miCont-130 Surface Contamination Monitor

The new Micasensor model miCont-130 is easy to use compact surface contamination monitor for simultaneous search and measurement of alpha/beta contamination of personnel and belongings leaving controlled and supervised zones or checking movement of people and objects out from contaminated area after an accident.

The unique operational advantage of the miCont-130 is ability to detail contamination as low as 5 by 5 cm square areas due to the use of multiple smaller individual detectors housed in one large probe. Search alarm algorithms are also designed to run individually for every smaller detector as well as the entire probe area with the gross count rate algorithm. This makes it equally easy to find small contamination spots with high activity and distributed low activity contamination. Results are displayed on easy to read color display individually for each detector as well as gross counts for the entire probe. The monitor can work in stand along modes or networked mode, where all data is automatically uploaded to the remote server over the LAN or RS-485 interface.

The miCont-130 monitor requires minimal or no training for use and ideally suits high traffic applications. It can be deployed as stand-alone self-monitoring station on temporary check-points in nuclear industry, radioactive waste management, mining and ore processing or as an add-on to the whole-body surface contamination monitors to increase checking throughput rates.

The miCont-130 has two operation modes: search mode for frisker operations and measurement mode with fixed count time when monitoring hands and objects and measuring vale of surface contamination.

In the search/frisker mode the monitor regularly checks for changes in background by comparing each new background count to the average background rate for each detector individually as well as gross count rate for the entire probe. If the change exceeds the user selectable sigma factor, the color of corresponding detector cell changes to yellow or red depending on count rate and alarm goes off. When not in use, the monitor updates algorithm with the new background, which allows to decrease false alarm rates due to probe contamination and environmental changes (gamma background and radon concentration).

In the Measurement mode the monitor measures surface contamination in counts per minute (cpm) per square centimetre for the entire area of the probe. Measurement time could be variable (depending on degree of contamination and preset threshold – the larger contamination is the shorter the measurement time is) or fixed time. After measurement is completed the monitor displays results and compares it with the preset thresholds. If threshold is exceeded, the warning message is displayed.

The monitor also stores conversion factors for the user selectable isotopes to display measurement results in Bq/sq. cm. By default, this is Sr-90/Y.