Quantitative measurement by artificial vision of small bubbles in flowing mercury

At the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), an accelerator-based neutron source located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Tennessee, USA), the production of neutrons is obtained by accelerating protons against a mercury target. This self-cooling target, however, suffers rapid heat deposition by the beam pulse leading to large pressure changes and thus to cavitations that may be damaging to the container. In order to locally compensate for pressure increases, a small-bubble population is added to the mercury flow using gas bubblers. The geometry of the bubblers being unknown, we are testing several bubblers' configurations and are using machine vision techniques to characterize their efficiency by quantitative measurement of the created bubble population. In this paper we thoroughly detail the experimental setup and the image processing techniques used to quantitatively assess the bubble population. To support this approach we are comparing our preliminary results for different bubblers and operating modes, and discuss potential improvements.