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Secular and Transient Equilibrium Formula

This document provides a derivation of the secular and transient equilibrium formulas for radioactive decay. It summarizes: 1) The derivation uses basic differential equations to model the decay of a parent isotope into a daughter product over time. 2) Transient equilibrium occurs when the parent isotope has a longer half-life than the daughter, causing their amounts to become proportional over time. 3) Secular equilibrium happens when the parent's decay rate is negligible compared to the daughter's, resulting in the daughter's formation rate becoming constant over time.

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Max dos santos ramos
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265 views4 pages

Secular and Transient Equilibrium Formula

This document provides a derivation of the secular and transient equilibrium formulas for radioactive decay. It summarizes: 1) The derivation uses basic differential equations to model the decay of a parent isotope into a daughter product over time. 2) Transient equilibrium occurs when the parent isotope has a longer half-life than the daughter, causing their amounts to become proportional over time. 3) Secular equilibrium happens when the parent's decay rate is negligible compared to the daughter's, resulting in the daughter's formation rate becoming constant over time.

Uploaded by

Max dos santos ramos
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Secular and Transient Equilibrium Formula

I will give the full derivation since although it is quite long and looks complicated it uses nothing more than
A-level mathematics. Despite this the solution of the differential equations is usually given as a standard
solution rather than derived.
Consider a parent isotope (P) decaying into a daughter product (D).
The rate of decay of P (which is also the rate of formation of D) is given by

The solution of this is the standard formula for decay

The rate of change of D is the rate of formation minus the rate of decay

Substituting the formula for Np from above we get

 
We may be tempted just to integrate both sides. However, we cannot do this sine we do not know how
ND changes with time.
The way to solve such equations is to remember the formula for the derivative of a product –

So now rearrange our equation

OK the left hand side does not look like the derivative of a product at the moment (probably because it
isn’t) but if we multiply everything by eλDt we get

So the left is now a derivative of a product so we can now integrate both sides

Multiplying both sides by e-λDt

We now have to work out what our integration constant is. If we take time t=0 all the exponent terms
become 1 since e0 is 1 and ND becomes the initial value of ND

We can now substitute this into our original equation for ND to give

Rearranging we get

Note that the last term is the decay of the initial concentration of the daughter product.
Decay Curves
From now on we are going to assume that there initially not daughter product. The plots are arbitrary units.
If you want to play about with them yourself then I have loaded the spreadsheets in xls and ods formats.
Decay of parent isotope to daughter isotope
You can see the typical decay curve for the parent when the two decay constant are very similar. The
daughter builds up and then slowly decreases as it and its source (the parent) decays.
NOTE: From now on the y-axis is logarithmic.

Daughter and Parent amounts – similar decay constants


This is similar to the graph above it but using a logarithmic scale.
Daughter and Parent amounts – parent longer lived than daughter
If the parent is longer lived than the daughter after a certain period of time the amount of the daughter
depends mainly on the rate of formation.
If we take our formula and ignore the last term – i.e. assume there is no daughter product initially then we
get

If the parent decay constant is significantly smaller than that of the daughter then after a reasonable length
of time.

and

The formal now becomes

and since

we have

i.e. the amounts become proportional to each other as seen on the plot above. This is known as transient
equilibrium.
Now we consider the case where the decay constant for the parent is negligible compared to that of the
daughter.
Since the amount of the daughter product depends mainly on its rate of formation and due to the small
decay constant of the parent this becomes constant.
Now we consider the activity – i.e. the number of decays per second from the daughter and parent. The
activity is just the amount times the decay constant:

First of all multiply through by λD

Subsitituting this into our formula we have:

Now if the decay constant for the parent is a lot smaller than that of the daughter.

and therefore

This is secular equilibrium.


Grand Daughter and Greate Gand Daughter
You can apply the same method to grand daughter and great grand daughter products. The general
formula is:

I shall put this into a spread sheet for you to use at some point. Note that it is you may think that you can
just apply the first formula several times. However, this does not work well since you have to set your time
scales to be very small to avoid losing some intermediate isotopes. Since the halflife of some isotopes vary
by many orders of magnitude.

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