MEASUREMENT OF NUCLEAR FUEL ROD DEFORMATION USING AN IMAGE PROCESSING TECHNIQUE

In this paper, a deformation measurement technology for nuclear fuel rods is proposed. The deformation measurement system includes a high-definition CMOS image sensor, a lens, a semiconductor laser line beam marker, and optical and mechanical accessories. The basic idea of the proposed deformation measurement system is to illuminate the outer surface of a fuel rod with a collimated laser line beam at an angle of 45 degrees or higher. For this method, it is assumed that a nuclear fuel rod and the optical axis of the image sensor for observing the rod are vertically composed. The relative motion of the fuel rod in the horizontal direction causes the illuminated laser line beam to move vertically along the surface of the fuel rod. The resulting change of the laser line beam position on the surface of the fuel rod is imaged as a parabolic beam in the high-definition CMOS image sensor. An ellipse model is then extracted from the parabolic beam pattern. The center coordinates of the ellipse model are taken as the feature of the deformed fuel rod. The vertical offset of the feature point of the nuclear fuel rod is derived based on the displacement of the offset in the horizontal direction. Based on the experimental results for a nuclear fuel rod sample with a formation of surface crud, an inspection resolution of 50 mu m is achieved using the proposed method. In terms of the degree of precision, this inspection resolution is an improvement of more than 300% from a 150 mu m resolution, which is the conventional measurement criteria required for the deformation of neutron irradiated fuel rods.