Potential Applications

Life sciences, e.g. plant research, cochlear research.
Advanced materials, e.g. additive-manufacturing, fibre-reinforced & carbon-epoxy composites, light-alloy development. In the case of additive manufacturing samples, it is possible to obtain valuable information on surface morphology as a function of the build direction and the size and complexity of the design.
Biomedical applications, e.g. osteocyte lacunae in bone, response of bone to load & tensile testing.
Earth & environmental sciences, e.g. volcanic product/ash.
Fuel science, e.g. effects of production methodology for coal/coke samples.
Petroleum industry, e.g. quantifying micro-porosity in rocks & shales (pore-size distribution, shape, connectivity and tortuosity).
Non-destructive characterisation, e.g. fossil in amber.
Dynamic studies, e.g. observation of the evolution of metallic foams.

Demonstration of X-ray micro-tomography of coal fragment in small Eppendorf tube (OD ~ 10mm) acquired during the hot commissioning phase of MCT Beamline with the following detail: White beam with heavy in vacuo filtration (0.2 mm diamond, 5 mm Al & 0.5 mm Cu); Optique Peter white-beam detector system with 1X objective (located at ~23 m from source); sample is mounted on general-purpose air-bearing CT stage on table B1 located at ~21.5 m from source; 30 flat fields & 30 dark currents are collected at start & finish, 1801 images collected over 180 deg in 0.1 deg steps – “step-&-shoot” mode – exposure time per frame 20 msec – total collection time ~100 min (less than 40 sec exposure time for all frames); total data size ~20 GB – file format TIFF. Beam-hardening correction is applied to the reconstructed data.

3D rendering of phase-retrieved tomography result for an ant sample (2.3 cm in length). The data was collected using 17 keV monochromatic (Ru/C stripes), in vacuo filtration – 0.2 mm diamond and 0.1 mm Al, with 1X objective lens in the imaging detector, 160 cm sample to the detector distance, 1801 images collected over 180 deg in 0.1 deg steps, 30 flat fields & 30 dark currents, “fly scan” mode – 2x4 stitching – total data size ~117 GB. TIE-Home phase retrieval was applied on the projection images before 3D reconstruction. Movie presentation was made using Dragonfly software.

Carbon fibre sample (PETG - Glycol modified Polyethelene Terephthalate) was collected using monochromatic 20 keV, exposure time 100 ms, 361 projection images at 160 mm sample to detector distance. The tomography reconstruction was done using MCT recontruction pipeline, data presentation using ORS-Dragonfly software.