Optimized inverse distance weighted interpolation algorithm for γ radiation field reconstruction

The inversion of radiation field distribution is of great significance in the decommissioning sites of nuclear facilities. However, the radiation fields often contain multiple mixtures of radionuclides, making the inversion extremely difficult and posing a huge challenge. Many radiation field reconstruction methods, such as Kriging algorithm and neural network, can not solve this problem perfectly. To address this issue, this paper proposes an optimized inverse distance weighted (IDW) interpolation algorithm for reconstructing the gamma radiation field. The algorithm corrects the difference between the experimental and simulated scenarios, and the data is preprocessed with normalization to improve accuracy. The experiment involves setting up gamma radiation fields of three Co-60 radioactive sources and verifying them by using the optimized IDW algorithm. The results show that the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of the reconstruction result obtained by using the optimized IDW algorithm is 16.0%, which is significantly better than the results obtained by using the Kriging method. Importantly, the optimized IDW algorithm is suitable for radiation scenarios with multiple radioactive sources, providing an effective method for obtaining radiation field distribution in nuclear facility decommissioning engineering.