On the Application of the Various Heating Rate Method to Determine the Activation Energy of the Dominant Trap from a Complex TL Peak

The various heating rate (VHR) method is used to determine the activation energy (E) of traps responsible for thermoluminescence (TL) peaks. The VHR method was developed and works well for single glow peaks. However, it is often applied to multiple overlapping peaks where one of the peaks is dominant. The use of VHR method for TL curves consisting of several peaks for determining the activation energy of the dominant peak may, due to an arbitrary selection of the heating rate set adopted for calculations, lead to a different result than the actual physical value of this parameter. The purpose of this work is to show how different results can be obtained using various heating rate sets in the VHR method for curves composed of two peaks with one clearly dominant. The method was used for several examples of TL curves generated numerically in such a way that the impact of the ratio of peak intensities, or peak mutual position on determining the energy may be observed.