Research objectives.
The aim of the project is to develop technology and deployment tools that enable in-situ ‘total characterisation’ of the materials and immediate environment of nuclear facilities.
Research objectives.
The main research questions being:
- what are the requirements for an integrated system comprising in-situ photonics/laser characterisation instrumentation and detection/sensor technology mounted on a remotely operated mobile platform and how should it be built?
- how can the various sensor measurements be used together?
- what are the capabilities and limitations of such a system when deployed in extreme nuclear scenarios?
To answer these questions a number of objectives have been developed as follows:
- Determine the most effective means to combine stand-off/remote LIBS and Raman spectroscopy and combine them with hyperspectral imaging and 3D LiDAR combinations for use in nuclear environments.
- Identify the most effective compromise between detection sensitivity, resilience to pile-up, saturation and radiation damage & the ability to comply with infrastructure requirements in terms of stability and safety in use.
- Determine the control system requirements for the robotic vehicles used to deploy the sensing system, integrate the various sensors onto the robot and determine the capability of the resulting system when used to navigate around nuclear facilities.
- Develop data analysis and visualisation tools that are able to extract information from the optical and radiological sensors and integrate these measurements together to generate the full characterisation of a range of active and non-active materials.
- Deploy the developed system into the five feasibility-focused nuclear case studies and evaluate its capabilities.
