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Plastic scintillator development for additive manufacturing and three particle detection

Chandler, Caleb
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Sellinger, Alan
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2024
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2024 - Mines Theses & Dissertations
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https://hdl.handle.net/11124/179277
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Abstract
All work included in this thesis contains the common thread of developing organic scintillating materials for radiation detection by enabling advanced detection capabilities or manufacturing techniques. The projects in this thesis include three different matrix materials – polyvinyltoluene in Chapter 2, bisphenol A ethoxylate diacrylate in Chapter 3, and polysiloxanes in Chapter 4. In Chapter 2, cationic polymerization was implemented for rapid photocuring of polyvinyltoluene scintillators, proving much faster than a radical mechanism. Vat photopolymerization additive manufacturing was accomplished through this method, with detrimental coloration and size dependent print resolution. In Chapter 3, a bisphenol A ethoxylate diacrylate resin was photopolymerized radically to additively manufacture plastic scintillators with resolution down to 100 microns. The secondary dopants necessary in plastic scintillator formulation provided a separate function as a photoblocker to promote printability of the resins with a 365 nm light source. In Chapter 4, thermally cured polysiloxane resins were used to host boron-10 containing small molecule dopants for thermal neutron detection. The optimal formulation outperformed Eljen’s EJ254B-5 product in terms of light output and thermal neutron capture up to 90 keVee, but suffered from stability issues cause by dopant precipitation. Overall, this thesis demonstrates a matrix focused approach to scintillator development: demonstrating that alternative polymerization mechanisms can be used to allow new methods of manufacturing, characterizing the advantageous effects of scintillating dopants during vat photopolymerization, and synthesizing thermal neutron sensitive elastomeric scintillators that outperform commercial standards.
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