Passive gamma tomography reconstruction of layered structures in nuclear waste vaults

摘要

In this paper we investigate numerically the reconstruction of the interior details of a nuclear waste vault using photon flux measurements. The passive gamma ray tomography method is employed in order to simultaneously retrieve the intensity and the location of strongly radioactive components. The inversion process is performed in a two-dimensional domain using a full scattering multi-energy group formulation. Only a small number of photon flux measurements are used in order to realistically mimic the practical situation in which the number of measurements is severely limited by the high-radiation environment. Two-dimensional layer structures bounded by straight interfaces are considered and detailed numerical results are presented for both very accurate and noisy data.