WO2001071300A1

WO2001071300A1 - Instrumentation addressable through a client/server paradigm

Info

Publication number: WO2001071300A1
Application number: PCT/US2001/008608
Authority: WO
Inventors: Michael J. Hoy; Aden Abernathy
Original assignee: Canberra Industries, Inc.
Priority date: 2000-03-17
Filing date: 2001-03-19
Publication date: 2001-09-27
Also published as: AU2001245840A1

Abstract

A method of operating an instrument for determining a parameter related to a material, comprising: using the instrument (10) to determine a parameter related to a material; using an embedded processor (50) to analyze and store data related to the parameter; connecting the instrument (10) to an Internet (40) and accessing the instrument (10) via the Internet (40) to monitor and/or control the instrument (10).

Description

Instrumentation Addressable Through A Client/Server Paradigm

Technical Field

The present invention relates to air monitoring generally and more particularly, but not by way of limitation, to a novel air monitor that is addressable through the Internet

Background Art

While the present invention is described with reference to air monitoring in a nuclear facility, and, in particular, alpha radiation monitoring in a nuclear facility, it will be understood that the invention is applicable, as w ell, to any type of instrumentation desired to be addressed through the Internet

Continuous Air Monitors (CAMs) are used in nuclear facilities to detect airborne alpha-emitting transuranic radionuclides in work areas, stacks, and ducts The primary function of a CAM is to issue an alarm if the transuranic activity exceeds a preset level, so that the appropriate safety procedures may be initiated At the same time, the alarm should not be triggered unnecessarily by the presence of the naturally occurring radon progeny The Department of Energy (DOE) Order 5480 1 1, "Radiation Protection of Workers^", and the 10CFR835 Implementation Guide that replaced it, include a requirement that a CAM should be able to alarm at an exposure level of eight derived air concentration-hours, or 8 DAC-hours. under controlled laboratory conditions However, designing a CAM that can reliably alarm at 8 DAC-hours under field conditions has been a difficult goal to achieve

Some CAM inlet designs have been shown to have difficulties obtaining a representative sample of the inhalable-size particles (< 10 μm aerodynamic equivalent diameter) without significant loss or bias See, McFarland, A R , Ortiz, C A , and Rodgers, J C , "Performance Evaluation of Continuous Air Monitor (CAM) Sampling Heads", Health Physics, vol 58, pp 275-291. 1990 Some designs show significant non- uniformity of filter deposits See, Biermann, A and Valen, L , "CAM Particle Deposition Evaluation^", in Griffith, R V , ed , "Hazards Control Department Annual Technology Review", Livermore, C A Report UCRL-5007-83, 1983 If the aerosol particles are predominantly deposited near the edge of the filter, the transuranic concentration in the air will be underestimated, and if the deposits are mainly in the center of the filter, the concentration will be overestimated See, Rodgers, J C and McFarland, A R , "Factors Affecting the Performance of Alpha Continuous Air Monitors^", presented at the 34^th Health Physics Society Annual Meeting, June 1989, Report LA-UR-89-7920, 1989 Also, the commonly used region-of-interest algorithms for subtracting the counts in low energy tail of the 6-MeV radon daughter sometimes have difficulty distinguishing the transuranic counts from the radon daughter interference, if the radon level is elevated

To address these difficulties, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, together with the Aerosol Technology Laboratory of Texas A&M University launched an effort to develop a new generation CAM This development effort culminated in a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement between Los Alamos National Laboratory and Canberra Industries, A description of the results obtained with the Los Alamos/Texas A&M CAM prototype have been reported elsewhere See, McFarland, A R , Rodgers, J C , Ortiz, C A , and Moore, M E , "A Continuous Sampler with Background Suppression for Monitoring Alpha-Emitting Aerosol Particles", Health Physics, vol 62, pp 400-406, 1992, and McFarland, A R , Bethel E L , Ortiz C A , and Stanke, J G , "A CAM Sampler for Collection and Assessment of Alpha-Emitting Aerosol Particles", Health Physics, vol 61, pp 97-103, 1991 Likewise, the methods and the results of the Canberra production units have been described See, Koskelo, M J , Rodgers, J C , Nelson, D C , McFarland, A R , and Ortiz, C A , "Performance Characterization of a New CAM System", Proceedings of the 22^nd DOE/NRC Nuclear Air Cleaning Conference, Denver, CO, August 24-27, 1992, NUREG/CP-0130, CONF-9020823, 1993, and McFarland, A R , Rodgers, J C , and Koskelo, M J , "Sampling Alpha-Emitting Transuranic Aerosols in the Nuclear Workplace", Los Alamos National Laboratory Report LA-UR-97-3646, 1998 In recent years, health physics instrumentation, such as continuous air monitors, is increasingly being incorporated into remote monitoring applications This includes accident scenarios, where the normal wired connections from instruments, such as continuous air monitors are difficult, or impossible to implement See. Rodgers, J , Moore, M , and Koskelo, M , "The Los Alamos National Laboratory Alpha- Environmental Continuous Air Monitor (α-ECAM)", Los Alamos Report LA-UR-99- 3468, 1999, presented at the ANS Emergency Preparedness and Response Conference, Sante Fe, NM, September 14-17, 1999 Wireless communication protocols are clearly possible, but they suffer from the drawback of the instruments not providing their data in a particularly optimized manner to limit network traffic Furthermore, vendors of radiation monitoring instruments typically provide the tools for uploading the data to a host, however, the proprietary nature of their communication protocols leads to increased computer support needs and installation expenses

To eliminate some of these complications, a committee of suppliers and customers of radiation monitoring instruments have defined an open network protocol for transferring packets of information from radiation monitoring equipment to network hosts in an agreed upon manner The committee termed this protocol "RadNet" RadNet is specifically designed to broadcast data from radiological instruments onto a standard Ethernet network RadNet communications protocols are documented and available on the RadNet homepage http //drambuie lanl gov/~radnet

Because RadNet utilizes standard Internet protocols, it is itself a non-proprietary standard However, providing an adaptation of linking legacy instruments, which inherently are not network ready, is not A networked embedded computer or network dongle, which sits between the radiation monitoring equipment and the RadNet network translates the output of such legacy instrumentation to the appropriate RadNet packets However, in its standard implementation, a network dongle only acts as a protocol translator For example, it simply converts an RS232 output of the Instrument to Ethernet

In modern computer networks, devices are assigned their own uniform resource locators (URLs) to provide addressing and accessing them on the public Internet and private intranets The URLs permit client systems to request the information available from computer servers on the network with the use of standard Internet browser software This URL client/server paradigm with a browser interface has previously not been extended to measuring devices in the health physics instrumentation and radioactivity measurements field to present real-time measurement results

Disclosure of Invention

A method of operating an instrument for determining a parameter related to a material, comprising using said instrument to determine a parameter related to a material, using an embedded processor to analyze and store data related to said parameter, connecting said instrument to an Internet, and accessing said instrument via said Internet to monitor and/or control said instrument

Brief Description of Drawings

The sole drawing figure shows a system according to the present invention

Best Mode for Carrying Our the Invention

The present invention embodies an implementation of the continuous air monitoring capabilities, including the determination of alarm conditions, the radon daughter background compensation algorithms and various other functions required by continuous air monitoring applications in an embedded processor that uses the URL client/server paradigm for access Local access is available with the use of standard terminal emulation software through an RS232 port Remote access is provided through a standard Internet browser interface via an Ethernet connection RadNet broadcasts are produced by the embedded processor independently of whether someone is connected to either the RS232 port via a terminal or to the Ethernet port via a browser Simultaneous access to the embedded system via the RS232 port and via the Ethernet port is also permitted The Ethernet port can be either a wired connection or a wireless connection using standard Ethernet networking hardware The sole drawing figure illustrates a system, according to the present invention, and generally indicated by the reference numeral 10 System 10 includes a cylindrical alpha radiation air monitor, generally indicated by the reference numeral 20 having a first section 22 comprising an air intake and filter, a second section 24 comprising radiation detection equipment including a pre-amplifier to detect alpha radiation, and a third section 26 comprising electronic equipment that performs analog-to-digital conversion and includes a multi-channel analyzer assembly to store the radiation energy distribution information

The network dongle 40 in this implementation communicates with third section 26 through an RS485 interface and performs the alpha activity, alarm determination, exposure calculations, and other functions related to a normal function of an alpha countinuous air monitor. In addition local access may be had over an RS232 interface to display alpha continuous air monitor measurement date, calibration status, and alarm information Furthermore, the network dongle 40 provides access to the Internet directly through its own on board Ethernet interface A monitoring system 50 connected to the Internet permits one to examine the data of air monitor 20 and/or to control its operation remotely While monitoring system 50 is shown as being a personal computer, other suitable means may also be used Monitoring system 50 can be located anywhere on the Internet

The uniqueness of this approach with an embedded processor lies in the fact that the instrument is now front-ended with a Web Site of its own, or at least it is made to appear that way A message server allows the instrument to run in parallel with Web Browser requests By doing this, the invention takes the most commonly used interface on the Internet and permits the above examination of data or operation control and one can see the health of the facility using, for example, Internet Explorer from Microsoft Corporation

Using this approach and the officially registered port numbers, the invention combines this with the ability to do directed subnet broadcast and allows a manager, for example, to monitor or control instruments from the Internet This means that the manager does not have to be on the same Network domain as the equipment and, in fact, the manager just has to be anywhere on the Internet and know the subnet where the equipment resides So, no matter where the manager is, he/she can know exactly the operational state of the instrumentation

It will thus be seen that the method efficiently attains the objects of the invention and, since certain changes may be made in the above method without departing from the scope of the invention, it is intended that all matter contained in the above description or shown on the accompanying drawing figure shall be interpreted as illustrative only and not in a limiting sense

It is also to be understood that the following claims are intended to cover all of the generic and specific features of the invention herein described and all statements of the scope of the invention, which, as a matter of language, might be said to fall therebetween

Claims

1 A method of operating an instrument for determining a parameter related to a material, comprising

(a) using said instrument to determine a parameter related to a material,

(b) using an embedded processor to analyze and store data related to said parameter,

(c) connecting said instrument to an Internet, and

(d) accessing said instrument via said Internet to monitor and/or control said instrument

2 A method of operating an instrument for determining a parameter related to a material, wherein said instrument is an alpha radiation monitor in a nuclear facility, but could also be an instrument measuring gamma or beta radiation if a different detector and electronics signal processing chain is used