Henry Moseley X-ray Imaging Facility
Following the awarding of grants from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the North West Development Agency (NWDA) and the University of Manchester Strategic Research Infrastructure Fund (SRIF) totalling approximately £2.5M, the School of Materials has commissioned a state-of-the-art computed tomography (CT) facility in the Materials Science Centre.
Specified to provide a suite of five complementary imagers over the widest possible range of spatial resolution capabilities, the Henry Moseley X-ray Imaging Facility provides academic and industrial users with access to world-leading characterisation and research CT instrumentation. The Facility has been structured to be openly available to academic and industrial users under both collaborative and purchased access arrangements, for public domain dissemination and proprietary agreements respectively.
The Facility complements and extends the capabilities which already exist within the School in the Stress and Damage Characterisation Unit for the non-destructive investigation of materials across a very wide range of disciplines. For example, samples and objects range from composites, biological, metallurgical, paper, textiles, archaeological, paleontological and geological, etc.
The spatial resolution to which samples may be imaged is a function of a number of factors, but as a guide the instruments' capabilites range from the millimetre (with a substantially sub-second time-resolution for reconstructed 3-d imaging), through the micron range (at accelerating energies up to 320kV) down to ~50 nanometres with phase contrast enhanced imaging possible in some instances. Sample types may range from heavy engineering items to micron-sized biological samples.
The ability to rapidly reconstruct the series of 2-d radiographs which are acquired into a 3-d tomographic image has to be allied to powerful visualisation software for the potential of the imaging equipment to be fully realised. Therefore, the Facility has commissioned a suite of four powerful workstations for this purpose. All the imaging instruments have the capability for independent reconstruction using either the acquisition PC or a dedicated PC, but in routine operation data are downloaded to a bank of local servers via a high speed LAN where the data can be stored and accessed by the workstations. This frees up the CT instrument for further acquisition.
The Facility is staffed by personnel with technical experience and with staff whose interests include the development of software algorithms and procedures to further enhance the quality of the data. Facility staff have active collaborations with the equipment manufacturers in these respects.