A simulation study for a cost-effective PET-like detector system intended to track particles in granular assemblies

Since many industrial applications rely on the processing of densely packed and moving granular ma-terial,obtaining bulk internal information on the particle movement inside the reactors is of great importance.Such information can be delivered by Positron Emission Particle Tracking(PEPT).By marking pellets with a positron-emitting radioisotope,the position of these tracer particles can be determined via the time-of-flight differences of the emitted gamma-ray pairs.The current paper proposes a PET-like detector system based on cost-effective organic plastic scintillators instead of the more common but expensive inorganic scintillators.This system is currently under construction and was tested for its resolution and efficiency in this simulation study.Using Monte Carlo simulations and the software toolkit Geant4,three different geometries(an empty glass box,a generic grate system,and a cubic box of 1 m3 completely filled with pellets)were investigated,leading to a spatial resolution in the millimeter range and an efficiency,defined as the ratio of reconstructed decay locations to simulated decays,of 2.7%,1.4%,and 0.3%.

A simulation study on spatial and time resolution for a cost-effective positron emission particle tracking system

This work is the second part of a simulation study investigating the processing of densely packed and moving granular assemblies by positron emission particle tracking (PEPT).Since medical positron emission tomography (PET) scanners commonly used for PEPT are very expensive,a PET-like detector system based on cost-effective organic plastic scintillator bars is being developed and tested for its capabilities.In this context,the spatial resolution of a resting positron source,a source moving on a freely designed model path,and a particle motion given by a discrete element method (DEM) simulation is studied using Monte Carlo simulations and the software toolkit Geant4.This not only extended the simulation and reconstruction to a moving source but also significantly improved the spatial resolution compared to previous work by adding oversampling and iteration to the reconstruction algorithm.Furthermore,in the case of a source following a trajectory developed from DEM simulations,a very good resolution of about 1 mm in all three directions and an average 3D deviation between simulated and reconstructed events of 2.3 mm could be determined.Thus,the resolution for realistic particle motion within the generic grate system (which is the test rig for further experimental studies) is well below the smallest particle size.The simulation of the dependence of the reconstruction accuracy on tracer particle location revealed a nearly constant efficiency within the entire detector system,which demonstrates that boundary effects can be neglected.