A review of acceptance testing of the Los Alamos/Canberra Alpha Sentry Continuous Air Monitor (CAM)

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) undertook the design and development of a new generation of alpha continuous air monitor (CAM) instrumentation that would incorporate advanced technologies in the design of the sampling inlet, multi-channel analyzer (MCA) electronics, solid state alpha detectors, radon background interference suppression, background interference compensation and based on spectral analysis, and microcomputer based data communication, processing, storage, and retrieval. The ANSI air monitoring instrument standards (Performance Specifications for Health Physics Instrumentation -- Occupational Airborne Radioactivity Monitoring Instrumentation, N42.17B) specify performance criteria and testing procedures for instruments and instrument systems designed to continuously sample and quantify airborne radioactivity in the workplace. Although the intent of the standard is to provide performance testing criteria for type testing, it is appropriate to evaluate the performance of a new instrument such as the Alpha Sentry against certain of these criteria for purposes of an acceptance test based on stated specifications and the Los Alamos CAM Requirements document. This report provides an overview of the results of these tests, as they pertain to instruments designed to detect alpha-emitting radionuclides in particulate form