Electronic speckle pattern interferometry for fracture expansion in nuclear graphite based on PDE image processing methods

Abstract

Nuclear graphite has been widely used as moderating and reflecting materials. However, due to severe neutron irradiation under high temperature, nuclear graphite is prone to deteriorate, resulting in massive microscopic flaws and even cracks under large stress in the later period of its service life. It is indispensable, therefore, to understand the fracture behavior of nuclear graphite to provide reference to structural integrity and safety analysis of nuclear graphite members in reactors. In this paper, we investigated the fracture expansion in nuclear graphite based on PDE image processing methods. We used the second-order oriented partial differential equations filtering model (SOOPDE) to denoise speckle noise, then used the oriented gradient vector fields for to obtain skeletons. The full-field displacement of fractured nuclear graphite and the location of the crack tip were lastly measured under various loading conditions.