Photothermal microscopy applied to the characterization of nuclear fuel pellets

F. ZALDIVAR ESCOLA; O.E. MARTÍNEZ; N. MINGOLO; R. KEMPF

JOURNAL OF NUCLEAR MATERIALS

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2013 vol. 435 p. 17 - 24

0022-3115

The photothermal photodeflection technique is shown to provide information on the homogeneity of fuel pellets, pore distribution, clustering detection of pure urania and gadolinea and to provide a two-dimensional mapping of the thermal diffusivity correlated to the composition of the interdiffused Gadolinium and Uranium oxide. Histograms of the thermal diffusivity distribution become a reliable quantitative way of quantifying the degree of homogeneity and the width of the histogram can be used as a direct measure of the homogeneity. These quantitative measures of the homogeneity of the samples at microscopic levels provides a protocol that can be used as a reliable specification and quality control method for nuclear fuels, substituting with a single test a battery of expensive, time consuming and operator dependent techniques.