The age of relics is determined by the amount of natural radiation that they were exposed to in the soil. Among the relics unearthed in our country are many ceramics showing the excellent culture of the nation. Quartz, the main component of ceramics, is compatible with thermoluminescence measurements because of the peculiarity of ceramics manufacture, and the relationship between the thermoluminescence intensity and the irradiated dose can be used to calculate the annual dose and to estimate the age of ceramics. The accuracy of the age is determined by the accuracy of thermoluminescence intensity measurements at the time of heating a quartz sample at a constant rate, and by the accuracy of annual dose estimates.
Kim Sung Ryol, a researcher at the Institute of Analysis, proposed a heating rate stabilization method for reproducibility and accuracy of thermoluminescence intensity and a method for estimating the annual dose rate from a ceramic sample in the soil by MCNP.
Unlike before, he applied heating temperature control to the set-point tracking method to ensure stability and to achieve correct detection of the peaks obtained from the thermoluminescence curve. In addition, he developed an MCNP-based annual dose rate assessment program to ensure the speediness of dating.
It was verified that the internal and external dose simulation calculation functions of the newly-developed computational system are in good agreement with the measurements reported in the literature and that it can be used to determine the annual dose rate of a real object.