Electronics for Instrumentation and Controls in Accelerator Driven Sub-Critical System

In this paper, we study the electronics in the instrumentation and control (I&C) systems for an accelerator driven sub-critical (ADS) system, where a target located at the centre of a sub-critical reactor core is bombarded by the protons from an accelerator. In comparison with a commercial reactor used in nuclear industry, more control electronics are required to exactly couple the high-energy beam from the accelerator to the spallation target in the reactor core. There is a strong drive to utilize standard commercial-off-the-shelf devices to minimize cost and development time. In order to improve the reliability of I&C systems, redundancy architecture has been considered by adding more electronic devices. In comparison with I&C system without redundancy, the dual redundancy architecture improves the reliability of the system by 20000 times. Then, we study the potential application of electronics devices, such as the preamplifiers for detectors, in the reactor building by shielding them with shielding materials. Since the most effective neutrons in creating radiation damages are those fast neutrons with the energy of more than 0.1 MeV, we have proposed a sandwich shielding method to reduce the neutron-induced radiation effects, in which the first and third layers are made of polyethylene and the second layer is made of heavy metal, e.g. tungsten. Simulation results with GEANT4 code have indicated that the shielding with a 30 cm-thick sandwich can increase the expected lifetime of electronics by 1258 times, and can reduce the soft errors caused by single event upsets by 5400 times.