Chapter 21 On-line Liquid Scintillation Counting M.R.Kibby

Calculation of quench corrections to liquid scintillation counting data is not intrinsically difficult, but is repetitive and time consuming. These characteristics make the calculations tedious to perform by hand but ideally suited to automatic processing. It is therefore not surprising that ma1_omputer programs to perform such calculations have been reported in the literature. Manufacturers of scintillation counters usually supply teletypes or card punches to produce punched paper tape or cards as the storage medium for the data. Consequently, most computer programs are orientated towards processing punched tape in a batch operation at a central computer, In general this approach is inflexible and slow, although feibility may be much increased by adopting a pseudo-on-line programming technique. Recently the cheapness of microprocessors has encouraged manufacturers to offer more computing ability and job control within the scintillation counter itself. However, these options tend to be expensive because of the cost of the associated dedicated peripheral devices such as floppy disks, videos or teletypes