Thickness prediction in metal alloys using nuclear techniques and artificial neural network: Modelling

Metal alloys are widely used in the aerospace, biological, civil and automotive industries, thus being very important to develop techniques to identify these alloys. Nuclear technique based on gamma densitometry is a non-invasive technique that is able to identify metal alloys using a radiation source and a scintillator detector. The measurement geometry and the dataset for training an artificial neural network were developed using the MCNP6 code. Therefore, this study proposes the thickness prediction of five aluminum alloys (2024-O, 2090-T83, 3003, 5086-O and 7075-O), a titanium alloy, and two steel carbon alloys (stainless 302 and stainless 316) ranging from 2 to 50 mm for four different gamma-ray radiation energies using gamma transmission and artificial neural network. A study to evaluate the reliability of the results was performed by analyzing the uncertainties in the data from the simulation with the MCNP6 code and the data predicted by ANN. The results indicate that it was possible to predict all the alloys thicknesses using the energy of ¹³⁷Cs radiation source, in which more than 96% of the cases with 5% of relative error, even for a group of alloys with very close densities values as aluminum alloys.