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Landaur: Automated Radiation Badge Processing System
Products Used
LabVIEW
PCI-MIO & PC-TIO Boards
SQL & SPC Toolkits
IMAQ Toolkit
Industrial Automation server
The Challenge
To design and develop a complete turn-key system that will pick radiation badges off a turntable, process radiation data, store the test data and archive the badges in a container. The complete development cycle needed to be completed in a very short development cycle time while keeping the throughput of badge processing very high.
The Solution
Aside from the short turn-around time, the system called for a development platform that would support fast and reliable data acquisition as well as image processing. An integrated environment that supports SQL capabilities and SPC trending while communicating to a badge-handling turntable via an Allen-Bradley SLC 504 PLC is also required. LabVIEW and other National Instruments software and hardware packages provided the best platforms to develop the solution.
Introduction
Landauer, in Glenwood, Illinois, manufactures radiation badges that are shipped to customers who work in radiation hazard environments. These badges are worn by customers and are sensitive to the radiation ( X-rays, Gamma rays, neutrons, etc.) in the environment. The badges help to monitor the radiation that a customer is exposed to in the work place, day in and day out. Once these badges are shipped back to Landauer, they are processed to determine the radiation levels that the customers have been exposed to.
V I Engineering, a premier National Instruments Alliance Member, has developed the Badge Processing system to acquire data from the returned badges and compute radiation parameters. Because of the volume of badges that are received daily, the processing system must be able to process at least 20 badges per minute at any one-reader station. Moreover, because of the nature of the data that is being handled, not only does the instrumentation guarantee accurate and reliable information, it also needed to archive the information. V I Engineering was commissioned by Landauer to build the instrumentation system for the reader, imager and archiver stations.
System Components
The main components of the Radiation badge processing systems are shown in the block diagram above. The three main components of the system are:
- Reader Subsystem: Loads the badges, cuts the badge packets into detector components, and reads radiation dose levels and calculates dose information.
- Imager Subsystem: Captures digitized Images of badges that require imaging, and calculates imaging parameters.
- Archiver Subsystem: Badges in archiver containers/bins.
The data from all three subsystems is stored in a shared MS-SQL server database. All three subsystems operate on a Windows NT platform and communicate to the server database via LAN. At present, the Reader Subsystem consists of two separate and independent stations with provision for further expansion.
Badge Reader Subsystem
The Badge Reader, which consists of two independent stations, constitutes the major subsystem of the processing system. Each reader station interacts with a turntable that loads and unloads the badges onto the reader. The turntables are controlled by Allen
Bradley SLC 504 PLCs. The Reader station communicates to the PLC via
RS Linx and controls the rotation of the motion of the turntable. It also receives the serial number of the badges from the PLC.
A Reader station consists of a computer system operating on Windows NT and houses two plug-in data acquisition cards - a PCI-MIO-16XE-10 multifunction I/O board and a PC-TIO-10 timing board. The instrumentation signals used by the system consist of five counter signals and five analog input signals. A clock signal generated by the
PC-TIO board pulses a laser beam. Digital Outputs operate the shutters for weak and strong beams. These shutters control the path of the laser beam before it impinges on the radiation detectors (sub-component of the badge). The laser light stimulates luminescence from the detector. The intensity of the luminescence is proportional to the radiation to which the detector had been exposed after it had been shipped to the customer.
The luminescence generated by the detector is conditioned through specialized instrumentation and is converted into TTL pulses electrical signals that are acquired through the DAQ card.
Other parameters monitored include laser power and ambient conditions.
Software
1. Operator Screen
The Operator Screen facilitates all aspects of processing badges for the Reader station. The badges arrive at the reader in three separate queues - Quality Control, Calibration and regular customer badges. Once the serial number of the detector waiting to be read is known to the reader (a bar-code scanner reads the serial number from the badges) it retrieves information about the badge stored in the SQL server database when it was originally shipped to the customer.
After the information is retrieved and the badge has been positioned on the turntable, the laser beam is directed on to the detector (PLC informs the reader when it is ready for a 'read' operation) and the reader initiates a 'read' operation.
After the read operation is completed, the required parameters are presented for SPC analysis and the SPC trend that is plotted in real-time is updated. The dose is also stored back in the MS SQL server database. Note that the software interface to the MS SQL server database is through the SQL server tool-kit. Depending on the dose-level read by the reader, the badge is routed to the Archiver Station for archiving or to the Imager Station for further analysis.
Apart from the regular customer badges, the reader also processes calibration and linearity badges.
Imager Subsystem
need to be imaged. This decision is determined by the reader based on the computed radiation dose level. Such badges are sent to the Imager station where an image of the detector is captured and digitized via a CCD Camera and transferred to the Imager station via an Image Acquisition board. The image thus acquired is processed by the IMAQ tool-kit and the calculated parameters are once again stored on the SQL server.
Archiver Subsystem
The Reader Station and the Imager Station have an archiver container attached to them. Once the data analysis is complete at each of the stations it is stored in this archiver bin. The archiver information in terms of container slot #, bin #, and warehouse information is displayed on an archiver station. The archival information is then updated to the SQL server database.
Conclusion
LabVIEW's GUI and integrated development environment along with National Instruments suite of hardware and software products provided V I Engineering with a generic broad platform that enabled a solution to be developed in a short period of time.
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