Evaluating the viability of Serpent in Passive Gamma Emission Tomography (PGET) radiation transport simulations

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School of Science | S harjoitus- ja seminaarityöt

Date

2021

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Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

23

Series

PHYS-E0441 - Physics Special Assignment V

Abstract

Passive Gamma Emission Tomography (PGET) has been developed for verification of spent nuclear fuel. To reliably detect missing or substituted fuel pins, verification processes with advanced image reconstruction and classification algorithms are developed. High-fidelity PGET simulations could provide valuable information for the development, and they need accurate modelling of spent nuclear fuel, gamma-radiation, and detector response. This thesis studies the viability of Monte Carlo particle transport code Serpent for PGET modelling, and the objective is to evaluate the viability of gamma-radiation transport in this application. A two-phased analog photon transport was used to simulate flux sinograms. To meet the available time-frame, the transport was divided into two consequent phases and it was benchmarked against a normal one-phased photon transport. The method was consistent with the reference calculation and an efficiency improvement of several factors was obtained. Results were visualized as flux sinograms, from which filtered back projection reconstructions were performed. Simulated reconstructed images were compared to experimental data to qualitatively estimate the performance of the simulation. Results of the simulations were physically sensible, but the framework has to be developed further. To have a fully capable simulation framework, the performance of the radiation transport has to be further increased to make it suitable for simulations of large populations of flux sinograms. The detector response was not simulated in this study, and it has to be implemented to obtain realistic results. Furthermore, once the framework is ready, the simulation has to be validated against other codes or experimental data.

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Keywords

photon transport, passive gamma emission tomography, Serpent

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