On the impact of neutron beam divergence and scattering on the quality of transmission acquired tomographic images

The impact of the divergence of a thermal neutron beam and the scattered neutrons on the quality of tomographic images acquired by transmission have been evaluated by using a third generation tomographic system incorporating neutron collimators under several different arrangements. The system equipped with a gaseous position sensitive detector has been placed at the main channel outlet of the Argonauta Research Reactor in Instituto de Engenharia Nuclear (CNEN-Brazil) which furnishes a thermal neutron flux of 2.3 × 10⁵ n cm⁻² s⁻¹. Experiments have then been conducted using test-objects with well-known inner structure and composition to assess the influence of the collimators arrangement on the quality of the acquired images. Both, beam divergence and scattering - expected to spoil the image quality - have been reduced by using properly positioned collimators between the neutron source and the object, and in the gap between the object and the detector, respectively. The shadow cast by this last collimator on the projections used to reconstruct the tomographic images has been eliminated by a proper software specifically written for this purpose. Improvement of the tomographic images has been observed, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach to improve their quality by using properly positioned collimators.