Abstract
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has begun the development of a program for the manufacturing and characterizing fuel pellets for use in advanced nuclear reactors. To achieve high reliability it is necessary to characterize the pellets during production runs. In this paper we present a simple TRISO Particle Counting And Sizing Tool (TP-CAST) that performs dual measurements of counting and size estimation for particles at rates up to 200 per second. The TP-CAST is based on a laser with line-generation optics and a PC-based data acquisition and analysis system. The instrument can measure 1000 micron pellets with a standard deviation of approximately 11 microns and with counting errors less than 0.075%. Our paper discusses the signal modeling, algorithms for size estimation, system design, and experimental results of the prototype TP-CAST system assembled at ORNL.
