Experimental determination of the thickness of aluminum cascade pipes in the presence of UF6 gas during enrichment measurements

Abstract

We present a method of determining the wall thickness of a pipe in a Gas Centrifuge Enrichment Plant (GCEP) when an empty pipe measurement is not feasible. Our method uses an X-ray tube for transmission measurements and a lanthanum bromide (LaBr3) scintillation detector on the opposite side of the pipe. Two filters, molybdenum (K-edge 20.0keV) and palladium (K-edge 24.35keV) are used to transform the bremsstrahlung spectra produced by the X-ray tube into more useful, sharply peaked, spectra. The maximum energies of the peaks are determined by the K-edges of the filters. The attenuation properties of the uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas allow us to determine wall thickness by looking at the ratio of selected regions of interest (ROIs) of the Mo and Pd transmitted spectra. While the attenuation factor at these two transmission energies in the UF6 gas is nearly equal, attenuation in the aluminum pipe wall at these two energies differs by a factor of about 60. This difference allows measurement of attenuation in the pipe independent of attenuation in the UF6 gas. Feasibility studies were performed using analytical calculations, and filter thicknesses were optimized. In order to experimentally validate our attenuation measurement method, a UF6 source with variable enrichment and pipe thickness was built. We describe the experimental procedure used to verify our previous calculations and present recent results.