behavior of 5CAC castable and other materials that were used as casings during the drying measurements. Fig. 5. Linear thermal expansion of common material candidates for casings of non- intrusive methods, the results are normalized from 100°C. Adapted from 13, 14, 15 . Moreover, the neutron tomography setup described herein can also be representative of a more realistic scenario, such as the refractory lining of a furnace. This is illustrated in Fig. 6, where the compatibility between a flat wall and the experimental setup is described by the specific boundary conditions. This yields an important tool to not only explore alternatives to improve the efficiency of the drying of different compositions, but also to obtain a deeper understanding of the drying phenomenon. Heating Rate Analysis The second set of analysis was based on the comparison of the drying behavior of samples heated with different protocols. Two 5CAC samples were heated with a fast (158 °C/min) and slow (10 °C/min) rates until the heater temperature reached 500° C. The reason for these high heating rates was the limited time in the NeXT equipment. Further tests will consider heating rates closer to the ones found on the industrial application. Fig. 7 presents the heating curves scheduled for the infrared heater, as well as the results of the relative difference in water content at different time steps. Fig. 6. The correspondence between the geometry and boundary conditions of a wall commonly found in the cases of interest, and the cylindrical neutron tomography sample with the ceramic casing. It is evident that the drying starts earlier for the sample heated with the 158 °C/min rate, where a noticeable drying front was detected with just 15 minutes of test, when the heater temperature is already at 500 °C. On the other hand, the slow heated sample only shows a drying front at the 39 minute mark, when the temperature is still at 425 °C. At the same time stage, the fast heating procedure starts to show the development of a secondary drying front at the bottom of the sample. This is only clear on the slow sample at the 47 minute mark. Most surprisingly is the fact that the final result at the end of the test is close for both heating conditions. This suggests that the temperature increase of the sample was probably the limitating factor, specially when the heater reached the plateau stage and the thermal conductivity became the regulating factor for the thermal energy transport. This result was also observed when the evolution of the mean relative difference of specific sub volumes of the sample were plotted, as shown in Fig. 8. The top slice behavior confirms that the heating starts earlier for the fast heating. The water release rate increases until a distinct peak is reached around the 23 minute mark.