학술논문

Semantic Segmentation of Micrographs for Nuclear Fuel Analysis and Degradation Quantification
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Access Access, IEEE. 11:118512-118520 2023
Subject
Aerospace
Bioengineering
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Computing and Processing
Engineered Materials, Dielectrics and Plasmas
Engineering Profession
Fields, Waves and Electromagnetics
General Topics for Engineers
Geoscience
Nuclear Engineering
Photonics and Electrooptics
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Robotics and Control Systems
Signal Processing and Analysis
Transportation
Photomicrography
Graphite
Degradation
Semantic segmentation
Nuclear fuels
Inductors
Analytical models
Computer vision
Deep learning
Neural networks
deep learning
fuel analysis
graphite
neural networks
nuclear materials
semantic segmentation
Language
ISSN
2169-3536
Abstract
When fuel materials for high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear reactors are quantification tested, significant analysis is required to establish their stability under various proposed accident scenarios, as well as to assess degradation over time. Typically, samples are examined by lab assistants trained to capture micrograph images used to analyze the degradation of a material. Analysis of these micrographs still require manual intervention which is time-consuming and can introduce human-error. While machine learning and computer vision models would be useful to this analysis, data for training such models is limited due to physical experiment costs, including lab hours and materials. This collaborative research are: 1) establishes an open dataset of micrographs and semantic labels named Graphite-23; 2) analyzes semantic segmentation architectures against the new data; and 3) contributes open source code for the community to progress research in degradation analysis of materials. A U-Net architecture with various backbones demonstrates competitive performance on the proposed dataset, with an mIoU up to 0.83, establishing a clear baseline for future research in this intersection of fields.