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Taking Neutrons To New Places

We have made many milestones this year as we take our neutron generator technology further for the betterment of humanity.

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Taking Neutrons To New Places
1.20.2021

2020: A Year In Review

2020 has been a difficult, at times frustrating and disappointing year in many ways. Amid global health crises and economic struggles, though, we have made many milestones this year as we take our neutron generator technology further for the betterment of humanity.

A Year of Transition: 2020 in the News

In January of 2020, Phoenix was awarded a US Army IDIQ contract to demonstrate neutron radiography techniques for munitions inspection. The $10 million ceiling IDIQ (indefinite quantity, indefinite delivery) contract with the US Army will allow Army radiographers to more easily identify defects and interpret part or assembly quality in the quality assurance of ammunition, armaments, or components of weapons and defense systems. Additionally, Phoenix is developing training programs which will introduce Army personnel to the fundamentals and practical applications of neutron radiography and working with Army subject matter experts and American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM) committees to develop new and rigorous standards for computed neutron radiography. This Army contract will continue to fund Phoenix’s innovative neutron radiography technology development and ensure continued skilled job growth.

There are many exciting developments afoot in the world of fusion energy and a lot of amazing new opportunities cropping up all over the world, and over the course of 2020 Phoenix has been working to seize these opportunities. We’re making great headway with clients in the fusion industry both within the US and abroad. In addition, in this past year we were invited by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to submit a proposal under its Galvanizing Advances in Market-Aligned Fusion for an Overabundance of Watts (GAMOW) program. Details of our proposal and Phoenix’s roadmap to further enabling fusion energy under this program are forthcoming in this quarter.

Four Phoenix employees being celebrated with balloons and signs in recognition of a new contract.

When COVID-19 hit and Dane County went under a lockdown order in late March, Phoenix was permitted to continue operating, allowing us to carry out our essential work at PNIC providing neutron imaging to our clients in the aerospace industry. We have taken all precautions to mitigate the risk of COVID transmission among our employees and continue to socially distance and encourage working from home to those who can. In Q1 2020, PNIC opened to general clients after fulfilling initial contracts with our clients who had arranged for beamtime in advance of the facility’s opening. In Q2, our nuclear fuel scanners passed several important milestones in their operation and installation, with one passing its final qualification and another successfully completing its factory acceptance testing. We also executed a revised supply agreement with our sister company SHINE Medical Technologies, extending our exclusivity to their planned second site. Phoenix is currently building the first four production units for SHINE’s Janesville facility “Building One.” In the last quarter of 2020, we onboarded our first long-term energetics customer at PNIC and executed a five-year supply agreement.

In the summer of 2020 as part of our participation in Black Philanthropy Month, Phoenix entered into a donation-matching partnership with Maydm, which provides to girls and youth of color in grades 6-12 resources and training to develop computational problem solving, creative and critical thinking skills, access to mentors and industry professionals, and internship opportunities to encourage them and prepare them to enter STEM careers. We’re happy to help Maydm and other sponsored organizations enrich the fields of science and engineering with new and diverse perspectives.

In the latter half of 2020, we developed our proposal for GAMOW, received a contract with the US Navy Office of Naval Research to execute a follow-on to the NEMESIS program to investigate a new methodology for detecting and characterizing unexploded munitions, and received a formal award notification from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science & Technology Directorate to begin negotiations for a contract to design and build a prototype neutron-based cargo scanning system dubbed IN-STINCT (Interrogation with Neutrons – Screening for Threats and Interdicting Narcotics in Cargo at High Throughput). Closing out the year, we passed an audit by Lockheed Martin which clears us as a secondary supplier to them and other Lockheed suppliers, officially opening us up to a pool of new clients such as Pacific Scientific. We’ve also begun planning the construction of a new neutron imaging facility on the United States West Coast. Details will follow later this month.

The entrance of Phoenix headquarters

While all this was happening, we were also building our new headquarters Heliopolis next door to PNIC. Construction on this new 50,000 square foot facility, designed from the ground up to meet the needs of our growing business, progressed throughout the year until coming to completion in November. By the end of December, all of our operations had been transferred over from our previous location in Monona to Heliopolis.

2020 by the Numbers

In the past year, we…

  • Added 26 new staff members and 4 new interns
  • Produced over 7.7×1019 (77,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 77 quintillion) neutrons in total
  • Took over 2700 neutron images
  • Secured $6 million in private equity funding
  • Had only 2 days of downtime in the 39 weeks PNIC has been open for business—a 99% uptime for our accelerator based neutron imaging system
  • Ran thermal N-ray operations for a total of 680 hours
  • Ran fast N-ray operations for a total of 230 hours
  • Completed construction on a 50,000 square foot headquarters in Fitchburg

ICYMI: Who’s Talking About Us?

Phoenix got a lot of media buzz in 2020. In addition to a few of our own articles we published in industry publications, here are a few of the pieces that covered our exciting innovations over the past year:

An engineer poses with a sign for a Reddit AMA

Our very own Dr. Evan Sengbusch also stepped up to give an interview about Phoenix for the podcast Innovating with Scott Amyx.

And last but not least, by far one of the most fun and exciting social media events we participated in last year was our second-ever AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit. This time, we joined the r/Engineering subreddit for a few hours to answer live questions about fusion energy and give career advice to nuclear engineers and prospective engineers in the community. Will we host another in 2021? Most definitely! We love these events and can’t wait to do another.

Taking Neutrons To New Places

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An N-Ray image of turbine blades.An X-Ray image of turbine blades.

The X-ray image (left) cannot clearly depict the cooling channels in a batch of blades; however, the channels show up more clearly in a neutron image of the same batch (right).

Aircraft Turbine Blades X-Ray/Neutron Imaging Comparison

The manufacturing of jet engine turbine blades is one particular industrial niche for neutron radiography. Turbine blades are cast around ceramic molds which form cooling channels that prevent the blades from melting when exposed to the high temperatures of their operating environments. In manufacturing, fragments of ceramic can clog these cooling channels. A blade with clogged cooling channels could break or even melt while in operation, so such flaws must be rooted out with 100% certainty. The X-ray image (left) cannot clearly depict the cooling channels in a batch of blades; however, the channels show up much clearer in a neutron image of the same batch (right).

gadolinium tagging

This cross section of a turbine blade shows off one of the most useful and unique applications of industrial neutron radiography. The only way to reliably detect the ceramic fragments which can be left within a blade’s cooling channels is to wash the blade in a solution containing gadolinium, an element with a high neutron cross section. Once the gadolinium has permeated the ceramic’s porous structure, the fragments will show up in stark contrast on the resulting neutron image even after the solution has been rinsed off of the rest of the blade.

N-Ray Image of a gun. X-ray image of a gun.

The neutron image (right) shows details that a high-energy x-ray image (left) would not depict, even the presence and position of gunpowder in the cartridge.

Beretta 92FS Neutron/X-Ray Imaging Comparison

Neutron radiography is especially useful for imaging munitions. In this neutron image, neutrons interact with parts within the firearm and show details that a high-energy x-ray would not depict, even the presence and position of gunpowder in the cartridge.

170kV X-ray imaging

440kV X-ray imaging

Neutron imaging

Rotary Telephone X-Ray/Neutron Imaging Comparison

X-rays and neutrons interact with materials differently, creating unique images. This rotary phone is comprised of many dense and light materials. The lower-energy 170 kV X-rays could not penetrate the denser materials of the phone. The higher-energy 440 kV X-rays could penetrate the denser materials, but was too high-energy to create an image of the lighter materials. The neutron beam could penetrate dense materials but not light materials, creating neutron radiograph that shows more detail of the phone’s inner workings than either X-ray image could on its own. The difference in how neutrons interact with light materials is what makes neutron radiography such a powerful complementary tool to X-ray radiography in materials science, materials research. and non-destructive testing applications.

Flower Neutron Images

Flowers tend to show up very distinctly on both neutron and X-ray images. However, water has a very high neutron scattering cross section, which makes neutron radiography and tomography useful for studying water uptake within root systems and rooted soil.

60kV X-ray imaging

140kV X-ray imaging

200kV X-ray imaging

Neutron imaging

Hand Plane X-Ray/Neutron Imaging Comparison

With examples such as this hand plane, it’s “plane” to see how neutron radiography and neutron images can show you details that can’t be seen with X-ray radiography. These three X-ray radiographs of varying energies, looked at as a whole, all together show almost as many details as a single neutron picture!

Welding flux on a copper plate (photo)

Welding flux on a copper plate (X-ray)

Welding flux on a copper plate (neutron image)

Welding Flux X-Ray/Neutron Imaging Comparison

Like gadolinium, boron has an extremely large neutron cross section that makes it useful as a contrast agent in neutron imaging, among other things. In this example, welding flux, which contains large quantities of borax, attenuates neutrons particularly well compared to metals such as copper. This makes neutron imaging useful for assessing the quality of welds and making certain that undesirable remnants of flux do not remain on a welded part.

MORE ON boron's neutron contrast properties
An X-Ray image of the fuel injector structures.An X-Ray image of the fuel injector structures.An N-Ray image of the fuel injector structures.

The X-ray images (top and center) miss important details regarding the fuel injectors’ structure. The N-ray image (bottom), on the other hand, offers more detail than either X-ray image alone.

Fuel Injector X-Ray/Neutron Imaging Comparison

As with the images of the rotary phone, these fuel injectors depict the differences between high and low energy X-ray images as well as neutron imaging. The image taken with 100 kV X-rays misses important details regarding the fuel injectors’ structures because the X-rays cannot easily penetrate the dense outer layers of material. However, the image taken with 190 kV X-rays also misses important details because while the X-rays can pass more easily through the denser material, they also pass too easily through the lighter material as well. Neutron imaging, on the other hand, offers more detail than either of the X-ray radiography images on their own.

In particular, two of the fuel injectors have been clogged with contaminants (we used ketchup, butter, and mustard), which show up as white blockages in the plugs in the neutron image and do not show up at all in the X-ray images. This shows the value of neutron radiography and tomography in rooting out defective parts and other non-destructive testing applications!

INTERACTIVE N-RAY/X-RAY COMPARISON

Click and drag on the vertical line to compare X-ray radiography and neutron radiography images. One advantage neutron imaging methods offer over the X-ray images is that details that did not show up on either the high-energy or low-energy X-rays, such as blockages within the fuel injectors, are visible.

An N-Ray image of the fuel injector structures.An X-Ray image of the fuel injector structures.

225kV X-ray image

400kV X-ray image

Neutron image

Proxivision Ball Bearings X-Ray/Neutron Imaging Comparison

Click and drag on the vertical line to compare X-ray and neutron images.

Neutron Imaging of Hard Disk Drives

Because of the way neutron beams pass easily through dense metal components, the neutron image of the 3.5″ hard disk drive on the left mainly shows the less dense plastic components of the hard drive’s internal structure. the 2.5″ external hard drive on the right is entirely encased in a plastic shell which is more opaque, but not entirely opaque, to the neutron beam.

INTERACTIVE N-RAY/X-RAY COMPARISON

Click and drag on the vertical line to compare X-ray and neutron imaging. To neutron tomography, most of the metal components of the hard disk drive, such as the faceplate, the read/write heads, and the disks themselves, are completely transparent, allowing a clearer look at some components that are not as visible, if at all, in the neutron radiograph compared to the X-ray image.

We’re batty for neutron radiography at Phoenix!

Unlike X-rays, neutrons are attenuated heavily by flesh and muscle, giving a unique perspective to the radiographic image of these bat specimens. That is one of several reasons why your dentist probably isn’t interested in shooting neutron radiation at your teeth during your dental check-up.

Neutron Radiography of Consumer Electronics

Neutron radiography can provide an interesting look into consumer electronics. As in the hard drive images, the plastic tends to be more opaque to neutrons in the neutron beam than most of the electronic components, providing a unique view of the structures of these items.

Photograph

X-ray image

Neutron image

Personal Safe X-Ray/Neutron Imaging Comparison

Your secrets aren’t safe from X-ray vision or neutron vision, but both forms of radiography show quite different perspectives in these images. Plastic components, which are rich in hydrogen, are particularly opaque on the neutron images but much more transparent on the X-ray images due to the high neutron attenuation of plastics and other hydrogen compounds. A closeup of the Honeywell safe shows that neutron imaging could even pick up on the details of the embossed logo on the door to the safe!

Flashlight X-Ray/Neutron Imaging Comparison

Both neutron radiography and X-ray radiography can offer distinct advantages over each other. In these images, both depict unique features of the flashlight in question. Phoenix is currently working on imaging methods to seamlessly combine the data from X-ray and neutron imaging together into hybrid images, which would allow for an unparalleled look into an object’s inner working for cases in which both X-ray radiography and neutron radiography provide indispensable data.

*N-ray image on top. X-ray image on the bottom.

Neutron Radiography of a Jar of Staples

Click and drag on the vertical line to compare X-ray and neutron imaging. For a rather offbeat comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of X-ray and neutron imaging, we filled a glass jar with staples and a single plastic figurine. In the X-ray image, only the staples are visible. With neutron imaging, the staples are far less visible, but the figurine hidden within is entirely visible as the neutrons interact more heavily with the plastic.

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