METHODS FOR DETERMINING SOIL CONTAMINANT PROFILES FROM PROMPT-NEUTRON GAMMA ACTIVATION DATA

J.K. Shultis, R.E. Faw, and F. Khan, Department of Nuclear Engineering, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, 66506

ABSTRACT This paper summarizes three mathematical models used to describe how contaminant concentration profiles in soil may be inferred from the intensities of neutron-induced capture-gamma photon intensities measured at the soil surface. In particular, the linear regularization, linear regularization with an iterative positivity constraint, and the Backus-Gilbert methods are applied to the soil contamination problem. Examples of each of the three methods are presented for idealized test contaminant profiles.

KEYWORDS: PGNAA, soil, inversion methods, contamination profiles

This paper is from the Proceedings of the HSRC/WERC Joint Conference on the Environment, May 1996, published in hard copy and on the Web by the Great Plains/Rocky Mountain Hazardous Substance Research Center.

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