Development of an absorption model for gas discharge lamp simulation

Abstract: Ultraviolet (UV) light has been used for disinfection purposes for over 100 years. Irradiation by UV light is a method to disinfect surfaces in order to prevent microbiological growth. At Tetra Pak this is of great importance as they are manufacturer of filling machines. Those filling machines must ensure a certain level of sterility on all packages produced. The irradiation process can be simulated using Geant4 which is a software package that tracks particles through matter. The simulation model used today does not consider the absorption of photons inside of medium-pressure UV lamps. By understanding the absorption that takes place in the lamp, one can quantify how changes in the design would impact the emitter output. In this master's thesis, the aim is to develop a model that can describe the interaction of photons with a medium-pressure UV lamp. An absorption model was suggested and developed with the assumption of local thermodynamical equilibrium and existing Hg radiative data. A simulation including the collision process in Geant4 was used. In this collision process the non-radiative transition probabilities were assumed to be the same as that of the radiative, this was done in order to demonstrate how it can be done. It resulted in collisions populating other states allowing more transitions to be present in the final output spectrum. The collision process and a method for computing the Einstein's emission coefficient with the software package General Relativistic Atomic Structure Package is proposed as future work.