Developments in synchrotron x-ray computed microtomography at the National Synchrotron Light Source

Last year, the X27A beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) became dedicated solely to X-Ray Computed Microtomography (XCMT). This is a third-generation instrument capable of producing tomographic volumes of 1-2 micron resolution over a 2-3mm field of view. Recent enhancements will be discussed. These have focussed on two issues: the desire for real-time data acquisition and processing and the need for highly monochromatic beam (.1 % energy bandpass). The latter will permit k-edge subtraction studies and will provide improved image contrast from below the Cr (6 keV) up to the Ca (36 keV) k-edge. A range of applications that benefit from these improvements will be discussed as well. These two goals are somewhat counterproductive, however; higher monochromaticity yields a lower flux forcing longer data acquisition times. To balance the two, a more efficient scintillator for X-ray conversion is being developed. Some testing of a prototype scintillator has been performed; preliminary results will be presented here. In the meantime, data reconstruction times have been reduced, and the entire tomographic acquisition, reconstruction and volume rendering process streamlined to make efficient use of synchrotron beam time. A Fast Filtered Back Transform (FFBT) reconstruction program recently developed helped to reduce the time to reconstruct a volume of 150 x 150 x 250 pixels(3) (over 5 minion voxels) from the raw camera data to 1.5 minutes on a dual R10,000 CPU. With these improvements, one can now obtain a "quick look" of a small tomographic volume (similar to 10(6) voxels) in just over 15 minutes from the start of data acquisition.