Experimental ultra fast X-ray computed tomography with a linearly scanned electron beam source

Abstract

We devised and tested a computed tomography approach that utilises a scanned electron beam X-ray source to produce fast tomographic image sequences of transient density distributions. Potential application areas for this technique are the visualisation and measurement of two-phase and particle flows in thermofluid dynamics research, chemical processes, or transport systems for fluids and bulk solids. In our setup we used a linear deflection pattern for the electron beam and a non-annular detector arc to record transmission data of an object from different projection angles. This approach gives the highest achievable axial resolution and is comparatively moderate in effort and costs. For the inverse problem we applied iterative image reconstruction techniques to reconstruct the density distribution from a limited data set. The method has been experimentally tested on static and dynamic phantoms with a frame rate of 1000 images per second and a spatial resolution of approximately 1 mm in plane and axial.