Coded aperture material motion detection system for the ACPR

Single LMFBR fuel pins are being irradiated in Sandia's Annular Core Pulsed Reactor (ACPR). In these experiments single fuel pins have been driven well into the melt and vaporization regions in transients with pulse widths of about 5 ms. The ACPR is being upgraded so that it can be used to irradiate bundles of seven LMFBR fuel pins. The coded aperture material motion detection system described is being developed for this upgraded ACPR, and has for its design goals 1 mm transverse resolution (i.e., in the axial and radial directions), depth resolution of a few cm, and time resolution of 0.1 ms. The target date for development of this system is fall 1977. The paper briefly reviews the properties of coded aperture imaging, describes one possible system for the ACPR upgrade, discusses experiments which have been performed to investigate the feasibility of such a system, and describes briefly the further work required to develop such a system. The type of coded aperture to be used has not yet been fixed, but a one-dimensional section of a Fresnel zone plate appears at this time to have significant advantages