Neutron spectrum unfolding using artificial neural network and modified least square method

In the present paper, neutron spectrum is reconstructed using the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Modified Least Square (MLSQR) methods. The detector's response (pulse height distribution) as a required data for unfolding of energy spectrum is calculated using the developed MCNPX-ESUT computational code (MCNPX-Energy engineering of Sharif University of Technology). Unlike the usual methods that apply inversion procedures to unfold the energy spectrum from the Fredholm integral equation, the MLSQR method uses the direct procedure. Since liquid organic scintillators like NE-213 are well suited and routinely used for spectrometry of neutron sources, the neutron pulse height distribution is simulated/measured in the NE-213 detector. The response matrix is calculated using the MCNPX-ESUT computational code through the simulation of NE-213 detector's response to monoenergetic neutron sources. For known neutron pulse height distribution, the energy spectrum of the neutron source is unfolded using the MLSQR method. In the developed multilayer perception neural network for reconstruction of the energy spectrum of the neutron source, there is no need for formation of the response matrix. The multilayer perception neural network is developed based on logsig, tansig and purelin transfer functions. The developed artificial neural network consists of two hidden layers of type hyperbolic tangent sigmoid transfer function and a linear transfer function in the output layer. The motivation of applying the ANN method may be explained by the fact that no matrix inversion is needed for energy spectrum unfolding. The simulated neutron pulse height distributions in each light bin due to randomly generated neutron spectrum are considered as the input data of ANN. Also, the randomly generated energy spectra are considered as the output data of the ANN. Energy spectrum of the neutron source is identified with high accuracy using both MLSQR and ANN methods. The results obtained from MLSQR and ANN methods for Cf-252 and Am-241-Be-9 source are validated against the ISO spectrum. The unfolded neutron energy spectra from both MLSQR and ANN methods show a good agreement with the actual spectrum of Cf-252 and Am-241-Be-9 source. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.