The project finished in February 2023 with the final demo performed at the ENEA Casaccia laboratories at the end of January.
The project had been extended by 9 months to attenuate the negative effect of the COVID-19 pandemics and all the problems connected with supply of electronic components but not only. Thanks to the extension and, most of all, the effort by all the partners, the final demo took place as expected and the work scheduled at the beginning of the project was completed.
Management and exploitation work packages achieved all their goals by the end of the project.
The technical work packages where successfully completed in time for the final demo, some minor adjustment had to be made with respect to the initial plan due to unavailability of the dedicated resources not present anymore at the end of the project.
The neutron inspection techniques, both active and passive, were effectively shown at the demo, the whole chamber was built and assembled thanks to the combined effort of ENEA, CEA and CAEN. The system performed brilliantly exceeding the minimum detectable activities (MDA) of similar commercial systems.
The gamma station saw the combination of different kind of technologies, the segmented gamma scanner based on the high purity germanium detector was combined with the RadHand for a full characterization of a drum, then the gamma camera was used to identify possible hot spots. This system provides a detailed view along the longitudinal axis of the RWP, plus a picture detailing possible area that emit higher than desired gamma flux. The RadHand could be used not only for gamma spectroscopy measurements but also to take a picture of the drum and read/write the RFID tag.
Still in the scope of gamma investigation techniques there is the photofission, demonstrated at the CEA facility near Paris, which potential was showcased during the project and similar drum to those used in the final demo in Rome where inspected.
Finally, we had another measurement system dedicated to the storage facilities, which was designed to be low cost and low maintenance to populate as much as possible a facility storing hundreds of RWP. The system is based on two different detectors: scintillating fibers to detect gamma and a doped Si detector for the neutrons, this system was tested at various partners’ premises and shown during the final demo using real drum at the ENEA. The results were impressive and also variation due to meteorological effects were observed.
All these systems were developed and built during MICADO, some from scratch some from existing parts and fully integrated thanks to the project, where each subsystem was fully tested in dedicated laboratories and at the end we tested the whole system at ENEA Casaccia, showing great performance in terms of resolution and MDA.
The integration could not overlook the main thread connecting the dots in MICADO: the digitalization. The outputs of each measurement system are fully digitalized and saved in a dedicated database, a customized version of the CAEN DigiWaste, to properly save the measurements in the database various interfaces between each detector and the database had to be done. Then, once saved, these measurements could be combined, also with the help of Montecarlo simulations, in order to decrease the uncertainty associated with them.
This uncertainty optimization process was performed following simulation studies on specific virtual cases, the quantification of the uncertainty related to the characterization of a RWP was recomputed in a Bayesian interference approach in which the a priori is updated each time according to the real knowledge of the RWP. Therefore, the final uncertainty is not just a sum of the uncertainties but better reveal the actual knowledge of the drum.
The overall status of the project at the end of the final demo was satisfactory, of course some technologies were more mature than others since the beginning and this is reflected by the TRL reached by each of them. The readier subsystems have been included among the key exploitable results (KER) on the EU portal, they are:
Gamma multi scanner, Active and passive neutron scanner, DIGIWASTE database platform.
During the project we participated to many events organized by partners, stakeholders, or regulatory bodies. The interest on the digitalization technologies offered within the MICADO framework was always genuine and its modularity/scalability praised.
