TOMOGRAPHY OF NUCLEAR-FUEL EXPERIMENTS WITH AN ELECTRONIC LINE SCAN CAMERA

A line scan camera has been developed, which may be applied for tomography in the non-destructive examination of nuclear fuel experiments. The camera has been tested with different radiation sources like 400 kV X-ray tubes, an 18 mV betatron and a thermal neutron beam. The camera uses silicon photo-diode-arrays with an integrated shielding suppressing most of the radiation coming from elsewhere than from the source. Tomograms of preirradiated fuel pins were generated showing the fuel debris distribution after an over-power test. Various phantoms have been tomographed, which demonstrate the feasibility of imaging cross sections of fuel bundles nondestructively. The system is able to measure density distributions in a 0.3 mm thick cross section with about 0.3 mm spatial resolution. The camera itself is small and the control computer of standard industry type. Thus the tomography system is transportable and may be integrated in existing nondestructive facilities. © 1990.