Radiotracers and What Are They Used For?

Renegade Services deals with various substances and radiotracers, which are substances having atomic/nuclear, chemical, physical or biological properties, which can help observe, identify or follow the behavior of different chemical, physical or biological processes.

These radioactive tracers are extensively utilized for diagnosing industrial reactors, e.g. by measuring the rate of flow of solids, liquids and gases.

Radioactive tracer is a certain chemical compound where one or more than one atom was replaced by radioisotope. Radiotracer is used for exploring mechanism of chemical reaction to monitor its radioactive decay.

Also, they are used for flow-visualization with different type of technologies, e.g. SPECT, Computed Radioactive Particle Tracing (CARPT) and Position Emission Tomography (PET).

Nowadays, radiotracer technology is used for diagnosing specific causes of inadequacy in plant or any process operation and also for investigating processes in the industries and also those linked environment, where a major cost-benefit ratio is gleaned from troubleshooting and process optimization.

You can expect that this role may continue to expand, particularly if engineers and students are exposed in academic training about many possibilities of such tool for various research, development or application.

IAEA will play a major role to facilitate transferring of this radiotracer technology to few developing member states by its projects related to technical cooperation.

It also helps them with various developments of human resources, provide support to educate young specialists and also helps maintain good practices which are needed for ensuring sustainability of technologies as well as knowledge transfer.

For radiotracer specialists, training materials developed and all radiotracer practitioners worldwide will include the time distribution methods for all environmental and industrial applications.

Preparing for a radiotracer investigation

Before running radiotracer investigation, various requirements have to be met. Most important among these will be to choose an appropriate radiotracer.

Fundamentally, radiotracer compound will behave almost in the same way like material which is to be traced.

For obtaining meaningful and reliable results, industrial radiotracer should also meet all other basic requirements, e.g. suitable half-life or radiation energy, and also physical/chemical stability.

Before you inject tracer into any system, it must also be quite clear how it can behave inside it. During certain circumstances, tracer can undergo phase change, decomposition, undesirable absorption/adsorption or chemical reaction with all system constituents.

Often it is hard to meet all requirements of any ideal tracer. Few compromises are necessary even if radiotracer will meet the required criteria. It may also not be available for tracer groups in many developing countries.

Post Author: Hattie Braden