Spatial Uniformity Assessment of Particles Distributed in a Spherical Fuel Element Using a Non-Destructive Approach

In many manufacturing procedures, a large number of identical particles need to be disseminated uniformly into a given space. The uniformity of the spatial distribution of the particles can be critical to the properties of the final products. We proposed an image processing-based non-destructive technique to evaluate the particles' spatial uniformity in a spherical space imaged with computed tomography. Both graphic (qualitative) and numerical (quantitative) methods were developed to demonstrate the (non-) uniformity of the particles. Simulation results indicated that the technique helped detecting the non-uniformity in the particles' spatial distribution accurately. We conclude that the proposed technique can be used to test whether a number of particles in a sphere are uniformly distributed statistically and graphically.