(193h) Developing Robust and Rapid Methodology of Image Processing System for Individual Ex-Core TRISO-Fueled Pebble Recognition

As the world works toward satisfying its electricity demands, nuclear power will play a significant part in the overall mix of energy sources utilized. Future fossil fuel depletion, growing concerns about emissions, the increasing global warming, expanding economies, and the need for sustainable growth and boom ensures that the use of nuclear energy will continue to be important and required in the years to come.

The generation of nuclear power plants changed since its conception to become four distinct generations. Nuclear power plants were subject to continuous development effort that resulted, up to the current day, in four generations. Fourth generation (Gen IV) nuclear reactors are being designed and investigated worldwide. Six innovative designs were proposed as Gen IV candidates for next-generation nuclear plants (NGNPs). The primary advancement of the proposed Gen IV nuclear reactors, compared to older generation nuclear plants, is improved nuclear protection and security, enhanced thermal efficiency, danger-unfastened proliferation (higher resistance to the proliferation of fissile materials), minimal generation of radioactive waste and their safe control, as well as low-cost design. All of these characteristics yield construct cost reduction and operation of NGNPs. Due to the high thermal performance of these reactors, they can be utilized to generate either electricity, in addition to heat generation for usage in industrial settings.

The high temperature gas-cooled reactor, which is one of the six candidates for Gen IV NGNPs, is considered as a promising option for Generation IV advanced reactors. Interest was aroused by the various advantages of this new technology, which include their modularity, enhanced safety, broad applications ranges, and short construction periods. The TRISO-fueled pebbles used in advanced gas-cooled and salt-cooled reactors have a diameter of 6 cm and are made up of an inner fuel zone with a radius of 2.5 cm, which shelters the TRISO nuclear fuel particles and an outside graphite shell with a thickness of 0.5 cm. To measure the burnup, these pebbles are pulled out of the outlet at the base of the nuclear reactor's core one at a time. If their burnup level falls below the threshold, they are sent back to the reactor. It's crucial to prevent excessive burnup accumulation by ensuring that these pebbles are not kept in the core for a prolonged period. To determine whether a pebble has unexpectedly remained inside the reactor core for a long time and to figure out the cause of the excessive burnup accumulation, it is crucial to tag and identify each pebble inside the reactor core. This article provided and verified a novel, robust bullet-time tagging, and tracking system based on computer vision techniques that have been investigated for tagging and tracking each pebble to satisfy the requirement for identifying the residence time of each pebble in the reactor's core. Six spots on the surface of the graphite spheres were imprinted with a three-digit ID number at random using Ultra-High Temperature Ceramic (UHTC) printing. A deep learning-based object detection model bookkept the residence time of each pebble after passing through the bullet-time photography system that can capture the details of each pebble’s surface. Once a certain pebble comes out of the pebble bed and passes through the bullet-time photography system again, it will immediately be sought out from the reference library to record the transit or residence time.