Morphology comparison of uranyl oxalate precipitations across scales

The effect of process scale on the morphological properties of nuclear materials remains a pertinent question for the development of signatures for material provenance. Precipitations of uranyl oxalate, UO2C2O4, were carried out at three process scales at three separate laboratories: 1 gram, 20 grams, and 400 grams. The parameters of the chemical synthesis were the same across precipitation scales, though the process equipment varied from magnetically stirred beakers at lower scales to specifically designed reactors at 400 grams. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used to collect micrographs of each UO2C2O4 precipitate and their subsequent calcination and reduction products. Segmentation was used to quantitatively compare particle size and shape features. Unsupervised machine learning and high-dimensional statistical tests, namely d-dimensional Kolmogorov Smirnov (ddKS), were used to quantify and compare morphologies holistically. Findings from the morphological comparisons will be presented.