A Practical and Precise Technique for Determination of Beta Emitter Source in Thickness Gauging of Thin Film

The nuclear thickness gauging systems play an important role in the industry for invasive, online, and continuous measurements. The goal of the Beta thickness gauge is to obtain a precise measurement of thin films in which the performance of these gauging systems and output data quality are evaluated with the parameters including resolution, contrast, etc. The choice of the emitted suitable energy distribution of the Beta source is one of the effective factors in the system performance and precise measurement of thin films. In this research, a Beta thickness gauge with ¹⁴⁷Pm and ⁸⁵Kr sources was simulated and evaluated in biaxially oriented polypropylene sheet production lines in order to calculate the system performance due to Beta emitter sources with different energy distribution and select the suitable Beta emitter source. The relative error percentage, standard deviation, resolution, and contrast parameters for ¹⁴⁷Pm energy distribution were calculated 1.413, 0.113, 0.007, and 0.008, respectively. Also, these parameters for ⁸⁵Kr energy distribution were measured 2.750, 0.220, 0.014, and 0.001, respectively. The results reveal that the ¹⁴⁷Pm energy distribution has superior in comparison with the ⁸⁵Kr energy distribution for measuring of films or sheets with thin thickness.