MEPhI Devices for radioisotope monitoring of industrial equipment

2025: Introduction of Radioisotope Instrument

A radioisotope device for domestic metallurgy has been created at MEPhI. The university announced this on January 31, 2025.

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Фото: MEPhI

A line of radioisotope control devices for industrial equipment is being created at the MEPhI National Research Nuclear University. One of the already created devices interested Severstal Corporation and in the spring of 2025 will be tested at the Cherepovets Metallurgical Plant.

Production conditions at metallurgical enterprises often do not allow you to check to what extent some technological container (tank, tank) is full or empty in the usual way for everyday life - "open and see." To do this, you have to use more sophisticated monitoring methods, in particular, translucent technological capacities with gamma radiation. In the recent past, metallurgical plants used foreign control systems from Berthold Technologies () Germany and Thermo Fisher () for this USA. However, now the time has come, and our import substitution Russia own control systems are being created. One of them was created by a team of students and employees of NRNU MEPhI, headed by Alexander Khromov, assistant professor of the Department of Experimental Nuclear Physics and Cosmophysics of MEPhI.

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Фото: MEPhI

In the simplest case, the control system consists of two components: a gamma radiation source and a detector, which are placed on opposite sides of the controlled tank. The MEPhI has developed a domestic version of the detector-gamma relay. Radiation sources based on radioactive cobalt or cesium for the system created in MEPhI will be supplied by the St. Petersburg company Ritverts. However, the tests at Severstal will use radiation sources available to the metallurgical company itself.

According to Arina Vakhnina, a member of the development team, a 5th year student at the Institute of Nuclear Physics and Cosmophysics of MEPhI, a gamma relay that will be tested at Severstal in April 2025 can still answer one simple question: empty or full of the studied capacity. However, in the near future the detector will be improved, so that it will also be able to perform the functions of a level gauge, that is, a device that determines the level of content in the tank, as well as determine the density of the substance flowing through the pipe, which is in demand in the oil and gas and petrochemical industries. To do this, MEPhI programmers will modify the software of the device, which will allow you to "convert" data on the intensity of gamma radiation into the characteristics of the objects under study.

Also, a team of mythists is working on an even larger device designed to control the characteristics of steel sheet produced at metallurgical plants using X-rays. In the future, this four-meter height device should be built into the steel-rolling line, and control the quality of the rolled products produced during operation. It is planned that in the summer the MEPhI will begin to mount a prototype of this device, in the future it is also planned to test it at Severstal.

According to Arina Vakhnina, there are similar devices from Western companies on the market, which, despite the restriction, import products for a significantly higher price, so foreign devices are purchased only in critical situations. Domestic analogues have insufficient functionality. The plus of the MEPhI development is that the scientists of the nuclear university are ready to customize the device for the needs of the customer and carry out service. The attractiveness of the development also lies in the fact that it uses innovative components, for example silicon photomultipliers, thanks to which the devices have higher accuracy and can work in electromagnetic fields, which is important for metallurgical enterprises.

The project received support from the MEPhI and Rosatom Technological Accelerator.