Identification of Age, Temperature and Radiation Effect on Ferritic Steel Microstructure Based on Artificial Intelligence

In the construction of nuclear installation, it is important to know the material condition used on it. Considering mechanical properties of these materials, there are some material change affected by ageing, temperature and radiation. For some years, austenitic stainless steel are used as a fuel cladding in fast breeder reactor. However this material will not sufficiently competitive from economic point of view for the next year. Experiment result on ferritic steel gave information of stronger structural properties compared to austenitic stainless steel. Modeling and simulation will support further identification of this material changing caused by such effects. Pattern recognition of these changes base on artificial intelligence is expected to support the research and development activities on nuclear structure materials. Material structure pattern of these materials, observed by SEM, are converted using image processing system. Its characteristic is then analyzed with principal component using perception method, which usually used on identifying and learning neural network system based on artificial intelligence. Specific design and input are needed to identify the change of material structure pattern before and after any applied effect. In this paper, simulation of changing identification on three types ferritic steel F17(17 Cr), EM 12 (9 CR-2 MoNbV), and EMI 0 (9 Cr-I Mo) were done. The microstructure data before and after effect are taken from some references. The whole pattern recognition process are done using MATLAB software package. (author)