Neural Networks Applications and Electronics Development for Nuclear Fusion Neutron Diagnostics

This thesis describes the development of electronic modules for fusion neutron spectroscopy as well as several implementations of artificial neural networks (NN) for neutron diagnostics for the Joint European Torus (JET) experimental reactor in England. The electronics projects include the development of two fast light pulser modules based on Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) for the calibration and stability monitoring of two neutron spectrometers (MPRu and TOFOR) at JET. The particular electronic implementation of the pulsers allowed for operation of the LEDs in the nanosecond time scale, which is typically not well accessible with simpler circuits. Another electronic project consisted of the the development and implementation at JET of 32 high frequency analog signal amplifiers for MPRu. The circuit board layout adopted and the choice of components permitted to achieve bandwidth above 0.5 GHz and low distortion for a wide range of input signals. The successful and continued use of all electronic modules since 2005 until the present day is an indication of their good performance and reliability. The NN applications include pulse shape discrimination (PSD), deconvolution of experimental data and tomographic reconstruction of neutron emissivity profiles for JET. The first study showed that NN can perform neutron/gamma PSD in liquid scintillators significantly better than other conventional techniques, especially for low deposited energy in the detector. The second study demonstrated that NN can be used for statistically efficient deconvolution of neutron energy spectra, with and without parametric neutron spectroscopic models, especially in the region of low counts in the data. The work on tomography provided a simple but effective parametric model for describing neutron emissivity at JET. This was then successfully implemented with NN for fast and automatic tomographic reconstruction of the JET camera data. The fast execution time of NN, i.e. usually in the microsecond time scale, makes the NN applications presented here suitable for real-time data analysis and typically orders of magnitudes faster than other commonly used codes. The results and numerical methods described in this thesis can be applied to other diagnostic instruments and are of relevance for future fusion reactors such as ITER, currently under construction in Cadarache, France