Rapid prototyping of cost efficient X-ray collimators

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This paper reports on a novel technique for rapid and cost effective manufacture of bespoke X-ray shielding. This technique is particularly well suited for producing prototypes of complex collimators for proof of concept and/or short duration usage. Instead of heavily investing in state-of-the-art 3D metal printing to create X-ray collimators, a conventional plastic 3D printer was used to create a hollow shell of the correct geometry which was filled with tungsten powder as the X-ray attenuating material. In this paper we have applied this technique to produce a complex collimator for energy dispersive X-ray diffraction (EDXRD), which could not be manufactured using conventional machining methods. We compare the performance of this collimator to a solid tungsten 3D printed example of the same design. EDXRD shows that the two collimators have very similar performance with the backfilled collimator having marginally worse peak resolution in momentum transfer, which is attributed to X-ray transmission through the plastic walls and the much lower packing fraction of the tungsten powder. This technique is widely accessible and is capable of rapid prototyping complicated collimator designs, whilst at 1% the cost of using a tungsten 3D printing technique.