The Institute for Nuclear Research (Atomki) was established in the mid of the 20th century. The research portfolio of the institute is strongly based on the usage of low and middle energy accelerators; therefore, the ion beam related technologies and competencies have come to stay during the past human span. Due to the high level infrastructural background and personal knowledge, we can find logical synergies to obtain competences which could have relevance not only in the basic research but also in industrial and in other applications.
In order to realize industrial services and innovative actions the difficulties, problems, needs of the companies should be known precisely to show them solutions based on the Institute’s capabilities. However, we have concluded that companies do not like to talk about their problems, it is against their business interest. Therefore, we came to the conclusion that “the solution should find the problem”. Motivating by these arguments a register was produced which is listing and introducing the available competencies of Atomki which probably could be interesting for po tential industrial partners. ‘Competence – sheet’ includes both the personal and the infrastructural premises, furthermore a good example for the realization.
The competencies are collected and grouped into five areas named as: Plasma and ion beam technologies, Analysis of materials and surfaces, Nuclear measurement technologies, Environmental analytics, Radiochemistry and biomedical applications. The list of the competencies and the competence-sheets were published on the Atomki homepage.
In 2020, we have received a company request corresponding to one of our competencies; Radiation hardness tests of integrated devices. We can imitate working conditions for electronics in strongly radiative environments by the usage of an intense gamma source (e.g. 60Co) or by the external beamlines of our accelerators. This company is dealing with semiconductor devices and they want to build a drone for special tasks. It is planned to use the drone functionally as dosimeter to fly above critical radiation hot-spots (for example in case of breakdown of nuclear power plants). Due to the nature of the planned action these devices will receive high flux of diverse ionization radiation which may cause radiation damage of the information provided by the meter. The radiation hardness test of this device was provided by the usage of the external proton beam of our cyclotron.
We hope that due to this good practice we could offer such industrial services more frequently in the near feature.