Abstract
•Measurement of thermal neuron albedo for multilithic reflectors.•Modeling of experiments in MATLAB.•Comparison of numerical calculated and experimental values.•Study of thermal neutron albedo in different multilayered shielding.
An experimental measurement of the thermal neutron (0.025eV) albedo (αth) has been carried out for multilithic shielding by using Am–Be neutron source and BF3 detector. The measured saturation value for the thermal albedo of paraffin wax has been found to be 0.734±0.020, which is in close agreement to the corresponding value 0.83 quoted in the literature. The thermal neutron albedo has been measured for the multilayered shielding in copper–wood, copper–aluminum, wood–paraffin and paraffin–iron combinations in horizontal geometric configurations. Modeling and numerical simulation have been carried out by developing a MATLAB code which solves the diffusion equation in order to calculate the experimental results. Good agreement has been found between the numerical calculated and experimental results. The uncertainties in the measurements have also been calculated based on error propagation of the underlying Poisson distribution.