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Reimagining nuclear materials for the future of medicine
Nuclear medicine has come a long way since Henri Becquerel first observed the penetrating energy of radioactive materials in 1896. Today, technetium-99m alone is used in more than 40 million diagnostic procedures every year—from cardiovascular imaging and bone scans to cancer detection—making it the undisputed workhorse of nuclear medicine. That single statistic tells you something important: An enormous portion of modern diagnostic medicine rests on a surprisingly narrow foundation, one built around a small number of aging research reactors that were never originally designed for continuous isotope production.
Mauricio Tano, Pablo Rubiolo (Univ of Grenoble-Alpes), Julien Giraud, Veronique Ghetta (LPSC, CNRS/IN2P3)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 533-542
Inverse problem methods deal with the evaluation of the causal factors that result on a set of measurements or observations. Inverse problems found in nuclear reactors involve non-linear and coupled physical phenomena, making the causation effects complicated to de assessed. Furthermore, the extent of the experimental data collected is limited and this data is subjected to experimental noise. In the following paper, a method for solving inverse problems in nuclear reactors with coupled physical phenomena is developed. In the proposed approach, the inverse problem is solved through the minimization of a performance function. The minimization of this performance function is achieved with a preconditioned gradient descendent method. The generalized gradient of the performance function is obtained using the adjoint of the multiphysics equations of the system. Furthermore, for reducing the sensitivity to noise of the inverse problem, a preconditioner based in a Kalman Filter is developed. As an example, the methodology is applied for solving the inverse problem of finding the heat flux in the wall of a natural convection experiment.