Recovery of no-carrier-added 41Ca, 44Ti, and 26Al from high-energy proton-irradiated vanadium targets

Jennifer M. Wilson; Ionut Mihalcea; Mario Veicht; Đorđe Cvjetinović; Dorothea Schumann

doi:10.1515/ract-2022-0072

Abstract

Many useful and needed radionuclides for medicinal, astrophysical, and environmental research are produced naturally in inefficient quantities or not-at-all. In the method described here, rare cosmogenic isotopes were produced via spallation reactions in metallic vanadium and separated without adding any carriers. In the SINQ facility at the Paul Scherrer Institut, the vanadium targets were irradiated for two years with high-energy protons (≤590 MeV). After a cooling period of eight years, only relatively long-lived radionuclides such as ³²Si, ⁴⁴Ti, ⁴¹Ca, and ²⁶Al remain present. After target dissolution, ³²Si was first separated for a prospective half-life redetermination. The remaining ³²Si-free solution was used for extracting ⁴⁴Ti, ⁴¹Ca, and ²⁶Al, three key isotopes which are scientifically interesting for nuclear astrophysics research as well as medical applications. Each separation scheme employed ion-exchange and extraction chromatography; developed and optimized using inactive model solutions analyzed with Inductively Coupled Plasma–Optical Emission Spectrometry (ICP–OES). The irradiated samples were tracked with γ-ray spectroscopy for γ-ray emitting impurities. As a result, radiochemically pure sample solutions of ⁴⁴Ti, ⁴¹Ca, and ²⁶Al were obtained as “ready for use” in different application fields.

Keywords: extraction chromatography; ion chromatography; isotope production; no-carrier-added radionuclides; radiochemical separation

Corresponding author: Jennifer M. Wilson, Laboratory of Radiochemistry, Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI), Forschungsstrasse 111, 5232 Villigen, Switzerland; and Department of Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Bern, Hochschulstrasse 6, 3012 Bern, Switzerland, E-mail: jennifer.wilson@psi.ch

present address: Jennifer M. Wilson, Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.
Research funding: This project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) as part of SINCHRON (No. 177229) and received additional financial support from the European Union Horizon 2020 program under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 701647.
Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding this article.

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Supplementary Material

This article contains supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/ract-2022-0072).

Received: 2022-07-11

Accepted: 2022-12-21

Published Online: 2023-01-19

Published in Print: 2023-04-25

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Supplementary Material

Recovery of no-carrier-added ⁴¹Ca, ⁴⁴Ti, and ²⁶Al from high-energy proton-irradiated vanadium targets

Abstract

References

Supplementary Material

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