Deterministic simulation of thermal neutron radiography and tomography

In recent years, thermal neutron radiography and tomography have gained much attention as one of the nondestructive testing methods. However, the application of thermal neutron radiography and tomography is hindered by their technical complexity, radiation shielding, and time-consuming data collection processes. Monte Carlo simulations have been developed in the past to improve the neutron imaging facility's ability. In this paper, a new deterministic simulation approach has been proposed and demonstrated to simulate neutron radiographs numerically using a ray tracing algorithm. This approach has made the simulation of neutron radiographs much faster than by previously used stochastic methods (i.e., Monte Carlo methods). The major problem with neutron radiography and tomography simulation is finding a suitable scatter model. In this paper, an analytic scatter model has been proposed that is validated by a Monte Carlo simulation.