Medidas das concentrações de rádio em águas minerais disponíveis à venda no Brasil

Abstract

This thesis presents the survey results of measuring the activity of 226Ra in bottled mineral waters purchased in Brazilian market. The measurements were performed at the Laboratory of Applied Nuclear Physics at Federal Technological University of Paraná in cooperation with the Centre for Development and Nuclear Technology (CDTN) of the National Nuclear Energy Commission (CNEN). The study evaluates the possibility of using RAD7 equipament (Durridge Company) in order to measure 226Ra activity in equilibrium with 222Rn present in water samples at a level compatible with 0.1 Bq/L, which means greater accuracy than the usual practice of the equipment. Furthermore, the search provides the minimum error of radio activity concentration that can be achieved using the RAD7 equipament. The main difficulty of this work was to reduce the associated errors to the measure. To develop the optimized methodology were performed several tests that enabled the reduction of errors and ensure an innovative technique for measuring low concentrations of 226Ra in water, using the RAD7 radon electronic¬ detector. The experimental setup was based on the RAD7 and measurements were performed using the RAD H2O kit that identifies the activity concentration of 222Rn in small samples of 250mL. The results showed that the minimum error ranged from 0.02 to 0.07 Bq/L which constitutes a considerable and significant reduction in errors associated with low concentrations samples. When applied the optimized methodology proposed, it was concluded that all the samples had values below the established standards and recommendations and that the values found for the samples have similar order of magnitude to those found in the literature. Thus, the RAD7 radon detector electronics can be used in measurements of 226Ra in water at concentrations below 0,1 Bq/L, but for that, the technique developed in order optimize the procedure should be used.