An approach to unfold the response of a multi-element system using an artificial neural network

An unfolding procedure is proposed which aims at obtaining spectral information of a neutron radiation field by the analysis of the response of a multi-element system consisting of converter type semiconductors. For the unfolding procedure an artificial neural network (feed forward network), trained by the back-propagation method, was used. The response functions of the single elements to neutron radiation were calculated by application of a computational model for an energy range from 10^-2 eV to 10 MeV. The training of the artificial neural network was based on the computation of responses of a six-element system for a set of 300 neutron spectra and the application of the backpropagation method. The validation was performed by the unfolding of 100 computed responses. Two unfolding examples were pointed out for the determination of the neutron spectra. The spectra resulting from the unfolding procedure agree well with the original spectra used for the response computation