Optimization of the Development Process for Air Sampling Filter Standards

Air monitoring is an important analysis technique in health physics. However, creating standards which can be used to calibrate detectors used in the analysis of the filters deployed for air monitoring can be challenging. The activity of a standard should be well understood, this includes understanding how the location within the filter affects the final surface emission rate. The purpose of this research is to determine the parameters which most affect uncertainty in an air filter standard and optimize these parameters such that calibrations made with them most accurately reflect the true activity contained inside. A deposition pattern was chosen from literature to provide the best approximation of uniform deposition of material across the filter. Samples sets were created varying the type of radionuclide, amount of activity (high activity at 6.4 – 306 Bq/filter and one low activity 0.05 – 6.2 Bq/filter, and filter type. For samples analyzed for gamma or beta contaminants, the standards created with this procedure were deemed sufficient. Additional work is needed to reduce errors to ensure this is a viable procedure especially for alpha contaminants