Semi-automatic combustion of environmental and biological samples on Oxidizer M307 and equivalents: New solutions for background reduction.

The aim is to introduce and characterize a new experimental demonstrative model contributing to the increase of measurement accuracy, in terms of minimum detectable activity (MDA) and background reduction, for the analysis of samples having low concentrations in tritium and radiocarbon on Quantulus 1220. The clue is related to the qualitative and quantitative differences between tritium and carbon-14 inventories of the pulp used to manufacture the cups involved in noncatalytic combustion of samples by flame oxidation method. The quality of the experimental results depends on the temporal origin of the wood from which the pulp/cellulose was extracted/purified, the specific inventory contributing to the threshold level of the MDA for the beta-emitting radionuclide to be investigated.