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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Development of direct elemental analysis for process control of nuclear materials manufacturing

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In order to optimize the quality control processes of uranium and plutonium metals from nuclear industry production lines, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) appears as an efficient technique: it enables multi-element, fast and remote chemical analysis that require no sample preparation. Thus, the purpose of our work is to develop this technique towards the quantification of metal impurities in nuclear materials, with an analytical development achieved from surrogate materials. It follows another PhD thesis where a particular spectral band, Vacuum UltraViolet, has been chosen for its performance regarding the detection of several light elements in such materials. However, after performing analysis of depleted uranium samples, our work shows that the UV-visible band is more suitable for the detection of metal impurities. Then, the possibility of transferring the calibration from one material to another has been studied. To achieve this, the analytical signal has been normalized using three parameters: the laser-ablated mass, the plasma temperature and its electronic density. A standardized method, based on the deposit of an electrolyte on the sample surface, has been developed in order to measure these parameters with as less biases as possible in several different materials. These measurements enabled us to implement the calibration transfer in several of them, with performances similar to a calibration obtained from a single material.