Monitoring the Appearance of the End Faces of Fuel Pellets under Conditions of Conveyor Production

• Published in: Russian journal of nondestructive testing Vol. 59; no. 7; pp. 815 - 825
• Main Authors: Vlasov, E. V., Beloborodov, A. V., Zav’yalov, P. S., Syretskii, D. G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Moscow Pleiades Publishing 01-07-2023; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Algorithms; Characterization and Evaluation of Materials; Chemistry and Materials Science; Fuels; Image quality; Materials Science; Nuclear reactors; Optical Methods; Pellets; Quality control; Software; Structural Materials; image processing; fuel pellet; computer vision system; defect
• ISSN: 1061-8309; 1608-3385
• DOI: 10.1134/S106183092370047X

We consider the problem of quality control of fuel pellets for nuclear reactors. Various methods of obtaining and processing images of pellet surfaces were investigated when developing the testing system. The main difficulty of this task is the imperfect quality of the resulting image of the test object as well as limited time for its processing. For high-performance testing of the geometry of fuel pellets, hardware and software tools and algorithms have been developed to considerably increase the reliability of testing results. As a result of this work, we obtained stable images with a high degree of repeatability and with sufficient resolution that are suitable for subsequent high-performance reliable mathematical processing. A high degree of independence of the image and of the processing results of specific characteristics of individual products and their batches has been achieved.