Abstract
Plastic scintillators, due to their favorable characteristics compared with other dosimetry techniques, were used as detectors to estimate dose distributions in high gradient dose fields. In this study, a thin plastic scintillator (type BC-408) was coupled to a photomultiplier tube and multichannel analyzer as a technique for real-time dose measurements. The well-defined beta, gamma, and beta-gamma emitters (Cs-137, Ba-133, Na-22, Cd-109, Fe-55, and Am-241) have enabled parallel depth dose measurements with Monte-Carlo calculations to be critically compared. The measurements of doses were made for depths range of 0.1 mm to 5 mm. The MCNP dose results were comparable with the plastic scintillator detector and can be used to approximately estimate the dose rate values from mixed electron-photon fields. The minimum dose rate that can be measured by the plastic scintillator system was similar to 2 mu Gy/h and was for Cd-109 source of activity 222 Bq.