X-ray microtomography at Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation facility

Abstract

BL13W, an X-ray imaging beamline has been built and opened to users since May 6, 2009. More than 70 user proposals per year are granted and implemented at the beamline, with about 500 user visits/year. Up to now, X-ray microtomography (XMCT) is the dominated method for BL13W user operation, more than 70% user experiments were carried out with XMCT, covering the research fields in material science, biomedicine, physics, environmental science, archaeology and paleontology. To meet the user requirements, micro-CT imaging methods based on a variety of contrast mechanisms, including absorption, phase contrast, X-ray fluorescence, have been developed. Algorithms and related software have been developed achieve the low dose and fast data collection. Quantitative analysis to the three dimensional CT images is highly emphasized and related software for 3D information extraction with high precision and high efficiency, has been developed. Three-dimensional structure evolution has been attracting more and more attention in many scientific research fields. Two-Hertz dynamic phase contrast CT based on monochromatic SR beam was established at SSRF. The limitation of fluorescence X-ray CT from practical applications is the data-collection efficiency. The ordered-subsets expectation maximization algorithm was inducted to improve practicability of X-ray fluorescence computed tomography (XFCT), greatly. A scheme for full field XFCT was also proposed.