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In this study, the aim was to evaluate capabilities and constraints of radiographic imagery using thermal neutrons and gamma-rays as tools to identify the type of technique employed in ceramics manufacturing especially that used in prehistoric Brazilian pottery from Acre state. For this purpose, radiographic images of test objects made with clay of this region using both techniques - palette and rollers - have been acquired with a system comprised of a source of gamma-rays or thermal neutrons and a corresponding X-ray or neutron-sensitive Imaging Plate as detector. For the neutrongraphy samples were exposed to a thermal neutron flux of order of 105n.cm-2.s-1 for 3 minutes at main port of Argonauta research reactor of the Instituto de Engenharia Nuclear - IEN/CNEN. The radiographic images using y-rays from 165Dy (95 keV) and 198Au (412 keV) both produced at this reactor, have been acquired under an exposure time of a couple of hours. After acquisition, images have undergone a treatment to improve their quality through enhancement of their contrast, a procedure involving corrections of the beam divergence, sample shape and averaging of the attenuation map profile. Preliminary results show that difference between manufacturing techniques is better identified by radiography using low energy y-rays from 165Dy rather than neutrongraphy or y-rays from 198Au. Nevertheless, disregarding the kind of employed radiation, it should be stressed that feasibility to apply the technique is tightly tied to homogeneity of the clay itself and tempers due to their different attenuation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radiographic images acquired with point-like gamma-ray sources exhibit a desirable low penumbra effects specially when positioned far away from the set object-detector. Such an arrangement frequently is not affordable due to the limited flux provided by a distant source. A closer source, however, has two main drawbacks, namely the degradation of the spatial resolution - as actual sources are only approximately punctual - and the non-homogeneity of the beam hitting the detector, which creates a false attenuation map of the object being inspected. This non-homogeneity is caused by the beam divergence itself and by the different thicknesses traversed the beam even if the object were an homogeneous flat plate. In this work, radiographic images of objects with different geometries, such as flat plates and pipes have undergone a correction of beam divergence and attenuation addressing the experimental verification of the capability and soundness of an algorithm formerly developed to generate and process synthetic images. The impact of other parameters, including source-detector gap, attenuation coefficient, ratio defective-to-main hull thickness and counting statistics have been assessed for specifically tailored test-objects aiming at the evaluation of the ability of the proposed method to deal with different boundary conditions. All experiments have been carried out with an X-ray sensitive Imaging Plate and reactor-produced 198Au and 165Dy sources. The results have been compared with other technique showing a better capability to correct the attenuation map of inspected objects unveiling their inner structure otherwise concealed by the poor contrast caused by the beam divergence and attenuation, in particular for those regions far apart from the vertical of the source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]