Application of the Saltykov method for determination of the volumetric distribution of pores and grains

The determination of the volumetric size distribution of pores and grains is one of the necessary characterization for the quality control of nuclear ceramic materials. This determination is also becoming more important for other materials, once the form and the temporal evolution of these distributions have shown a correlation with several material properties. These are several methods for the determination of size distributions. The Saltykov method is probably the most used one due to its low sensibility to error propagation. In this paper the application of this method is described based on 9 years experience of the authors analysing materials as UO sub(2), (Th,U)O sub(2), (Th, Ce)O sub(2), (U, Gd)O sub(2), B sub(4)C, Al sub(2)O sub(3) and PZT, when nearly 500 samples were analysed. (author)