Black-Body-Based Scatter Removal Procedure for Quantitative Neutron Radiography at the MARS Beamline (CG-1D), HFIR
4 affiliations
- 1Department of Materials Science and Engineering
- 2Stanford University
- 3SIMES
- 4Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Abstract
Quantitative neutron imaging is fundamentally limited by scattering artifacts, low neutron flux, and wavelength-dependent attenuation, which restrict accurate transmission measurements. This work presents the first implementation and validation of the blackbody (BB) based scatter removal procedure (Carminati et al., 2019) for quantitative neutron radiography of engineering materials at the MARS beamline (CG-1D), High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The scatter removal pipeline was applied to a series of single crystal nickel (Ni) and polycrystalline austenitic (γ-phase) 316L stainless steel samples pre-charged with hydrogen gas (H2) at pressures of 1.5, 5, 12.5, and 20 kpsi. The BB correction removed a spatially varying scatter contribution of up to 8% of the local transmission that was not eliminated by conventional open-beam normalization. After scatter removal and subtraction of the metal-matrix attenuation, the resulting H attenuation coefficient, µH, increased monotonically with H concentration in both materials. Ni exhibited a higher H attenuation response than 316L stainless steel, consistent with differences in H solubility and trapping behavior. Pixel-wise maps further revealed concentration-dependent spatial heterogeneity, including localized regions of elevated µH in Ni at the highest H concentration. At the lowest concentrations, uncertainty in the interpolated scatter field exceeded the spatial-sampling uncertainty and established the effective detection floor of the measurement. Independent validation experiments were performed at the VENUS beamline of the Spallation Neutron Source using a H-free 316L stainless steel sample as a control and a water column with a known H number density as a reference standard. The corrected measurements recovered the expected zero H signal in the control and the H attenuation of the water reference, demonstrating that the pipeline can distinguish H attenuation from matrix and scatter contributions across independent beamline conditions. These results establish a validated workflow for removing sample dependent scatter and enabling quantitative analysis of neutron radiography data acquired at cold-neutron imaging beamlines.
Related
- QCxSimulation: Scatter-Aware X-Ray Projection Radiography via Discrete-Time Quantum Walks
- On imaging capabilities of the Imaging and Medical beamline at the Australian Synchrotron
- Automated end-station at the soft X-ray beamline featuring robotic air-to-ultrahigh-vacuum sample transfer, scanning probe spectroscopy, and machine learning analysis
- Validation of a FLASH-ready 25 MeV proton beamline for preclinical radiobiology experiments
- Generation, Accumulation, and Utilization of Data in the Automatically Controlled End-Station of a Soft X-ray Beamline
BibTeX
@misc{pal2026blackbodybased,
title = {{Black-Body-Based Scatter Removal Procedure for Quantitative Neutron Radiography at the MARS Beamline (CG-1D), HFIR}},
author = {Dayeeta Pal and James Torres and Yuxuan Zhang and Hassina Bilheux and Jean-Christophe Bilheux and Zipeng Xu and Edem Doe Honu and Leora Dresselhaus-Marais},
howpublished = {ChemRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.26434/chemrxiv.15009156/v1},
url = {https://chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10.26434/chemrxiv.15009156/v1},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Black-Body-Based Scatter Removal Procedure for Quantitative Neutron Radiography at the MARS Beamline (CG-1D), HFIR
AU - Dayeeta Pal
AU - James Torres
AU - Yuxuan Zhang
AU - Hassina Bilheux
AU - Jean-Christophe Bilheux
AU - Zipeng Xu
AU - Edem Doe Honu
AU - Leora Dresselhaus-Marais
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/21
PB - ChemRxiv
DO - 10.26434/chemrxiv.15009156/v1
UR - https://chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10.26434/chemrxiv.15009156/v1
AB - Quantitative neutron imaging is fundamentally limited by scattering artifacts, low neutron flux, and wavelength-dependent attenuation, which restrict accurate transmission measurements. This work presents the first implementation and validation of the blackbody (BB) based scatter removal procedure (Carminati et al., 2019) for quantitative neutron radiography of engineering materials at the MARS beamline (CG-1D), High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The scatter removal pipeline was applied to a series of single crystal nickel (Ni) and polycrystalline austenitic (γ-phase) 316L stainless steel samples pre-charged with hydrogen gas (H2) at pressures of 1.5, 5, 12.5, and 20 kpsi. The BB correction removed a spatially varying scatter contribution of up to 8% of the local transmission that was not eliminated by conventional open-beam normalization. After scatter removal and subtraction of the metal-matrix attenuation, the resulting H attenuation coefficient, µH, increased monotonically with H concentration in both materials. Ni exhibited a higher H attenuation response than 316L stainless steel, consistent with differences in H solubility and trapping behavior. Pixel-wise maps further revealed concentration-dependent spatial heterogeneity, including localized regions of elevated µH in Ni at the highest H concentration. At the lowest concentrations, uncertainty in the interpolated scatter field exceeded the spatial-sampling uncertainty and established the effective detection floor of the measurement. Independent validation experiments were performed at the VENUS beamline of the Spallation Neutron Source using a H-free 316L stainless steel sample as a control and a water column with a known H number density as a reference standard. The corrected measurements recovered the expected zero H signal in the control and the H attenuation of the water reference, demonstrating that the pipeline can distinguish H attenuation from matrix and scatter contributions across independent beamline conditions. These results establish a validated workflow for removing sample dependent scatter and enabling quantitative analysis of neutron radiography data acquired at cold-neutron imaging beamlines.
ER -