Performance evaluation tools for nuclear based interrogation techniques — an application of the PFNA technology

To facilitate the design and tuning of the Pulsed Fast Neutron Analysis (PFNA) system, under development for non-intrusive inspection of large cargo containers, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) has developed and utilized a family of computational tools to encapsulate the essential physics and system characteristics and to serve as a framework for hardware and software trade-off studies. One such tool is the PFNASIM code, a physics based, end-to-end simulator of the entire PFNA technology that maps the atomic densities of any material container to the observed γ-ray counts in each detector. Another tool is the PFNA Performance Evaluation Tool (PFNAPET) that utilizes estimation theory and the output of PFNASIM to predict the minimum error in estimated atomic densities inside the container. These two codes are described and an example of performance evaluation on a cargo container is included.