T. Kamiyama

Pulsed neutron imaging using 2-dimensional position sensitive detectors

2-dimensional position sensitive detectors are used for pulsed neutron imaging and at each pixel of the detector a time of flight spectrum is recorded. Therefore, a transmission spectrum through the object has wavelength dependent structure reflecting the neutron total cross section. For such measurements, the detectors are required to have ability to store neutron events as a function of the flight time as well as to have good spatial resolution. Furthermore, high counting rate is also required at the high intensity neutron sources like J-PARC neutron source in Japan. We have developed several types of detectors with different characteristics; two counting type detectors for high counting rate with coarse spatial resolution and one camera type detector for high spatial resolution. One of counting type detectors is a pixel type. The highest counting rate is about 28 MHz. Better spatial resolution is obtained by a GEM detector. Effective area is 10 × 10 cm2, pixel size is 0.8 mm. The maximum counting rate is 3.65 MHz. To get higher spatial resolution we are now developing the camera type detector system using a neutron image intensifier, which have image integration function as a function of time of flight. We have succeeded to obtain time dependent images in this camera system. By using these detectors we performed transmission measurements for obtaining the crystallographic information and elemental distribution images.

Radiographic and Tomographic Neutron Bragg Imaging for Quantitative Visualization of Wide Area Crystalline Structural Information

Recent status of the technical development of the Bragg-edge neutron transmission imaging and its application to material science is presented. The neutron Bragg imaging has the advantages in measuring large area with reasonable spatial resolution, and it is a non-destructive method capable of looking inside a bulk material. Therefore, various information that are quite different from EBSD, synchrotron microtomography and X-ray/neutron scattering can be obtained by this method. We carried out quantitative imaging to obtain crystalline microstructural information in ultralow-carbon steels that received the high pressure torsion (HPT). The real-space distributions of texture and grain/crystallite size of HPTed steels of four torsion numbers were quantitatively visualized at once. As a result, we could deduce unique distributions of microstructural information depending on each torsion number, and correlated them with real-space distributions of the Vickers hardness. We also successfully developed a versatile strain tomography technique that can obtain tensor values for strain although traditional CT techniques can deal with only scalar values. The new CT algorithm, the tensor CT method, is based on our original algorithm called FBP-EM. The strain tensor tomography using FBP-EM was successfully applied for the experimental measured result obtained with the VAMAS neutron strain analysis international standard sample.