Badges, TLDs etc etc Med Physics

[mikeland]

Hi Folks!


Does anyone have a list of suppliers/products that they have found that a good for sales and service of quality products in this area???

Many thanks!

[mikeland]

dead thread 

[Melissa White]

Not so dead..just limping along.

I'll take a stab at it.

The biggest suppliers of vended dosimetry are ICN and Landauer.  Harshaw is still around I think, or they may just be manufacturing the TL chips.

Most Power plants go for the Panasonic or Harshaw. 

I have more experience with the Pansonic Badges as I used to do Dosimetry off and on between HP gigs.

The hospital I have been working at for the last few years uses the Landauer Luxel badges:  Great for our applications, as the researchers using radioisotopes receive less than 100 mr per year.  The clinical folks, especially those in the heart cath and radiology areas receive much more, often exceeding the doses of the power plant averages.  We also have a cyclotron for isotope manufacture and those folks get the annual exposure that would compete with anyone working at an old BWR.

ANYWAY:  The luxel badges are a neat technology and can measure as low as one mRem. It's an OSL:
Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) Badge
   "The OSL dosimeter / reader technology is relatively new, and uses a laser to stimulate an aluminum oxide material that was in the badge for personnel radiation monitoring of occupationally exposed workers. With optically stimulated luminescence, a tiny crystal traps and stores energy from exposure to ionizing radiation fields. The amount of exposure can be determined by shining a green light on the crystal and measuring the intensity of the blue light emitted."

ICN provides panasonic TLD's and film badges as well. 

I'm not too impressed with the customer service aspects of Landauer, but they do respond.  My biggest beef is their software interface for the customer, which is about 20 years old and they won't get something simpler, simply because they don't have to.  They're the biggest dog.
  They do give us a bit of a deal on our prices however because well, we're just about the biggest dog at what we do.

2 cents
Melissa