Inspecting a Research Reactor's Control Rod Surface for Pitting Using a Machine Vision

Abstract

Inspection for pits on the control rod is performed to study the degradation of the control rod material which helps estimating the service life of the control rod at UMR nuclear reactor (UMRR). This inspection task is visually inspected and recorded subjectively. The conventional visual inspection to identify pits on the control rod surface can be automated using machine vision technique. Since the in-service control rods were not available to capture images and measure number of pits and size of the pits, the applicability of machine vision method was applied on SAE 1018 steel coupons immersed in oxygen saturated de-ionized water at 30°, 50° and 70°C. Images were captured after each test cycle at different light intensity to reveal surface topography of the coupon surface and analyzed for number of pits and pit size using EPIX XCAP-Std software. The captured and analyzed images provided quantitative results for the steel coupons and demonstrated that the method can be applied for identifying pits on control rod surface in place of conventional visual inspection.

Department(s)

Chemistry

Sponsor(s)

United States. Department of Energy

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

0022-3131

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2005 Atomic Energy Society of Japan (AESJ), All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Nov 2005

Link to Full Text

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