Study of the 199Au nanoparticles production parameters via irradiation of platinum target by using thermal neutrons.

In this study, the production parameters of 199Au nanoparticles (199AuNPs) have been investigated by a two-part study. The first part is about investigating the indirect method of producing non-carrier-added (NCA) 199Au radionuclide. MCNPX-2.6, TALYS-1.9, and ALICE/ASH-0.1 codes were applied as the theoretical approach to simulate the core of Tehran research reactor (TRR) for determining the activity of 199Au, specifying the production yield of 199Au, and calculating the excitation function of P198t(n,γ)P199t→A199u reaction. As the corresponding experimental approach, two 11 mg and 15.5 mg samples of enriched 198Pt metal powder were irradiated by thermal neutrons for 21 h and 10 min. The liquid-liquid extraction (LLX) technique has been used with a different solvent for each sample. LLX using ethyl acetate and LLX using Di-(2-Ethylhexyl) phosphoric acid (HDEHP) were applied for the 15.5 mg and the 11 mg samples respectively. The chemical yield of 199Au was calculated more than %99 for the 15.5 mg sample, and more than %80 for the 11 mg sample. The second part is about synthesizing 199AuNPs in an average size of 50 nm by using Turkevich method.