Radiation Protection Dosimetry Advance Access originally published online on April 27, 2006
Radiation Protection Dosimetry 2006 119(1-4):201-205; doi:10.1093/rpd/nci684
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Highly sensitive thermoluminescent carbon doped nanoporous aluminium oxide detectors
1 Departamento de Química Fundamental, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco Cidade Universitária, 50670-901 Recife, PE, Brazil
2 Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco Cidade Universitária, 50670-901 Recife, PE, Brazil
3 Departamento de Energia Nuclear, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco Cidade Universitária, 50740-540 Recife, PE, Brazil
4 Laboratório de Instrumentação Nuclear, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Caixa Postal 68509, 21954-970 Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil
* Corresponding author: wma{at}ufpe.br
In this work we present the synthesis, characterisation and the thermoluminescence (TL) response of nanoporous carbon doped aluminium oxide Al2O3:C produced by anodic oxidation of aluminium in organic and inorganic solvents. The X-ray and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) measurements reveal that the synthesised samples are amorphous and present highly ordered structures with uniform pore distribution with diameter of the order 50 nm. The photoluminescence and spectroscopic analysis in the visible and infrared regions show that the luminescence properties presented by the samples prepared in organic acid are due to carboxylate species, incorporated in anodic alumina films during the synthesis process. After an annealing treatment, part of the incorporated species decomposes and is incorporated into the structure of the aluminium oxide yielding a highly thermoluminescent detector (TL) . The results for X-ray irradiation in the range from 21 to 80 keV indicate a linear TL response with the dose in the range from 5 mGy to 1 Gy, suggesting that nanoporous aluminium oxide produced in the present route of synthesis is a suitable detector for radiation measurements.