Indigenous X-ray Industrial Tomography System

Industrial objects vary widely in their shape, size and density. It is often difficult to scan them on medical CT and Gamma ray CT systems due to the limitations of energy selection, gantry size, geometrical unsharpness and larger time of scanning. The imported technology available for scanning industrial objects is exorbitantly costly. Also, the technology transfer of these scanners was denied to India. DRDO has successfully developed an x-ray based Industrial Computed Tomography (ICT) system for scanning large objects.

The system consists of 450 kV x-ray source, 256-channel scintillation detector array (cadmium tungstate) and six-axes CNC mechanical manipulator. It can handle objects of the size 1000 mm diameter (shell), 6 m height and 2000 kg weight. The system has two scanning geometries-rotate only and translate-rotate-to accommodate different sizes of objects. The scanning time of objects has been considerably brought down due to 256-channel detector array and lesser integration time. Typical scanning time for a 200 mm diameter object is 5 min in rotate-only and 25 min for a 1000 mm dia shell in translate-rotate mode.

The spatial resolution of the system is one line pair/mm and the minimum slice thickness is one mm. Region-of-interest and 3-D visualisation of the system helps to see the extent of defect in 3-D. The critical and detailed information provided by this system is difficult to obtain by any conventional non-destructive testing method and is highly useful for various Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme and other projects.

The system is first of its kind and class of systems available in India, is more practicable, and a potential for non-destructive and reverse engineering applications.