Research of Radon Transportation Model to Investigate Buried Fault

How to get the position, direction and width of buried fault effectively is still very difficult when finding buried faults by measuring 222 Rn radioactivity. In this paper we established a technique to carry out buried fault investigation. It was based on Fick’s fist law, Darcy’s law and theory of clusters to analyze radon transportation and simulate 222 Rn transportation in ideal conditions. The feasibility indicates that measuring or investigating the concentration of radon to find abnormal region can help people find buried faults. 218 Po and 214 Po, daughter products of 222 Rn, are generally considered to be proportional to initial concentration of 222 Rn. 218 Po and 214 Po have short half-life of 3.05 min and 164us respectively which is very suitable for actual measure work. So in order to accumulate alpha particles effectively, soil gas sampling period is set about twice half-life of 218 Po. The established model is applied to analyze two buried fault areas in Southwest China and the results are really much better.Copyright © 2010 by ASME