Page 18 - Professorial Lecture - Prof Oyedele

Figure 4.1: Cancer treatment.

In Industry

Ionizing radiation is used for monitoring or gauging material thicknesses
(Gardner and Ely, 1967; Oyedele, 1983; Oyedele, 1988; Hubbell, 1990;
Hussein, 2004). It is also used for testing welds, checking whether packages
are full or have been filled properly, and determining the level of liquid in
non-transparent large (and also small) containers. Ionizing radiation is also
used in borehole logging in mining and oil exploration.

In Basic Sciences

Ionizing radiation is widely used for research or to study different
phenomena in Biology, Chemistry, Physics and related fields. Impurities (or
trace elements) as little as one part in a million can be determined using a
technique called “neutron activation analysis” which involves the use of
ionizing radiation (James and Oyedele, 1987; Khaled et al., 2009). In the
technique, a small sample of a material is irradiated or made radioactive in
a reactor and the ionizing radiation emitted is analyzed. The impurity has its
own characteristic radiations which will be used to determine the quantity
of the impurity. This technique is very useful in pollution studies and forensic
science. It has also been used to develop purer materials for transistors,
plastics, etc. Ionizing radiation is also used for void fraction determination in
two-phase flow systems (Oyedele and Harms, 1979; Oyedele, 1996).