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  • Accepted Manuscript: Fission gas bubble identification using MATLAB's image processing toolbox

Title: Fission gas bubble identification using MATLAB's image processing toolbox

Automated image processing routines have the potential to aid in the fuel performance evaluation process by eliminating bias in human judgment that may vary from person-to-person or sample-to-sample. In addition, this study presents several MATLAB based image analysis routines designed for fission gas void identification in post-irradiation examination of uranium molybdenum (U–Mo) monolithic-type plate fuels. Frequency domain filtration, enlisted as a pre-processing technique, can eliminate artifacts from the image without compromising the critical features of interest. This process is coupled with a bilateral filter, an edge-preserving noise removal technique aimed at preparing the image for optimal segmentation. Adaptive thresholding proved to be the most consistent gray-level feature segmentation technique for U–Mo fuel microstructures. The Sauvola adaptive threshold technique segments the image based on histogram weighting factors in stable contrast regions and local statistics in variable contrast regions. Once all processing is complete, the algorithm outputs the total fission gas void count, the mean void size, and the average porosity. The final results demonstrate an ability to extract fission gas void morphological data faster, more consistently, and at least as accurately as manual segmentation methods.
Authors:
 [1] ; ORCiD logo [1] ;  [2] ;  [2] ;  [2] ;  [2]
+ Show Author Affiliations
  1. Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO (United States)
  2. Idaho National Lab. (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
Publication Date:
Report Number(s):
INL/JOU-15-35421
Journal ID: ISSN 1044-5803; PII: S1044580316301760
Grant/Contract Number:
00140302
Type:
Accepted Manuscript
Journal Name:
Materials Characterization
Additional Journal Information:
Journal Volume: 118; Journal Issue: C; Journal ID: ISSN 1044-5803
Publisher:
Elsevier
Research Org:
Idaho National Lab. (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
Sponsoring Org:
USDOE
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS; 36 MATERIALS SCIENCE; 97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING; nuclear fuel; MATLAB; automated image analysis; fission bubbles; frequency domain filtration; segmentation
OSTI Identifier:
1294583