Non-destructive assay employing 2D and 3D digital radiographic imaging acquired with thermal neutrons and reactor-produced radioisotopes

• Autor(a) principal: Silvani, Maria Inês
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Outros Autores: Almeida, Gevaldo Lisboa de, Lopes, Ricardo T., Instituto de Engenharia Nuclear, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
• Tipo de documento: Artigo de conferência
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional do IEN
• Texto Completo: http://carpedien.ien.gov.br:8080/handle/ien/2426
• topic: INAC 2011; Digital radiographic; Radioisotopes; X-ray

The inner structure of some objects can only be visualized by using suitable techniques, when safety reasons or expensive costs preclude the application of invasive procedures. The kind of agent rendering an object partially transparent, unveiling thus its features, depends upon the object size and composition. As a rough rule of thumb, light materials are transparent to gamma and X-rays while the heavy ones are transparent to neutrons. When, after traversing an object, they hit a proper 2-D detector, a radiograph is produced representing a convoluted cross section, called projection, of that object. Taking a large number of such projections for different object attitudes, it is possible to obtain a 3-D tomography of the object as a map of attenuation coefficients. This procedure however, besides a time-consuming task, requires specially tailored equipment and software, not always available or affordable. Yet, in some circumstances it is feasible to replace the 3-D tomography by a stereoscopy, allowing one to visualize the spatial configuration of the object under analysis. In this work, 2-Dand 3-D radiographic images have been acquired using thermal neutrons and reactor-produced radioisotopes and proper imaging plates as detectors. The stereographic vision has been achieved by taking two radiographs of the same object at different angles, from the detector point of view. After a treatment to render them red-white and green-white they were properly merged to yield a single image capable to be watched with red-green glasses. All the image treatment and rendering has been performed with the software ImageJ.