Study of environment-friendly gas mixtures for the Resistive Plate Chambers
G. Proto*, B. Liberti, R. Santonico, G. Aielli, P. Camarri, R. Cardarelli, A. Di Ciaccio, L. Di Stante, A. Paoloni, E. Pastori, L. Pizzimento and A. Rocchi
*: corresponding author
Full text: pdf
Pre-published on: November 24, 2022
Published on: June 15, 2023
Abstract
The standard gas mixture for the Resistive Plate Chambers (RPC), composed of C2H2F4/i-C4H10/SF6, has a high Global Warming Potential (GWP 1430) mainly due to the presence of C2H2F4. This gas is not recommended for industrial uses anymore, therefore it will be problematic to use it in the next future. We report the performance of the RPC working with new environment- friendly gases which could replace the standard mixture. The new gaseous components have the Global Warming Potential (GWP) at very low level. In this work the standard mixture main component, the C2H2F4 (GWP∼1300), is replaced by a proper mixture of CO2 (GWP = 1) and Tetrafluoropropene (C3H2F4, GWP∼6). The other high-GWP component, the SF6 (GWP ∼ 23900), is replaced by a new molecule, the Chloro-Trifluoropropene (C3H2ClF3), GWP ∼ 5) never tested in the RPC detectors. The mixtures studied have a total GWP ∼ 10. We report, for several eco-gas mixtures, the detection efficiency, streamer probability, electronic and ionic charge as a function of the high voltage. Moreover the timing properties are studied and the detector time resolution is measured. We also focus the attention on a new category of signals having intermediate properties between avalanche and streamer, called ”transition events”. This category is negligible for the standard gas mixture but relevant for HFO based gas mixtures. We show a direct comparison between SF6 and C3H2ClF3 to study in depth the possibility to replace an industrially very important molecule like SF6.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.414.1207
How to cite

Metadata are provided both in article format (very similar to INSPIRE) as this helps creating very compact bibliographies which can be beneficial to authors and readers, and in proceeding format which is more detailed and complete.

Open Access
Creative Commons LicenseCopyright owned by the author(s) under the term of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.