X-ray Imaging for Non-Destructive Microstructure Analysis at SSRF

X-ray imaging has become an essential detection technique in a wide range of research fi elds since its discovery by Röntgen in 1895. Up to now, X-ray tube source based imaging systems have been widely used. However, limitations arise from insuffi - cient spatial and temporal resolution, and low contrast of these systems, which are unavoidable drawbacks. The availability of third generation synchrotron radiation (SR) facilities since the 1990s sheds light on the advancement of X-ray imaging. The high intensity, high coherence, quasi-parallel, and monochromatic characteristics of SR beams have enabled the development of SR-based high spatial and temporal X-ray imaging techniques. In the past decades, experiments have demonstrated the advantage of SR X-ray imaging in the fi elds of material sciences [ 1 ] and biomedicine. [ 2 ] The Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF) is a third-generation synchrotron radiation light source, and it provides a powerful technical platform for scientifi c research and industrial applications for scientists in China and overseas. The X-ray imaging beamline (BL13W1) is one of the seven initial beamlines at SSRF, and was formally opened to users in May 2009. The double crystal monochromator at BL13W1 provides photon energies ranging from 8 to 72.5 keV with a beam size of ca. 45 mm × 5 mm. The beamline aims at developing and evaluating the effectiveness of SR-based imaging techniques in planar or computed tomography (CT) modalities. [ 3 ] Several X-ray imaging methods, such as micro-tomography and quantitative imaging, [ 4 ] have been developed and they have found extensive applications in biomedicine, [ 5,6 ] materials science, [ 7,8 ] and so on. The X-ray imaging methods and the statistics for user research fi elds at BL13W1 are shown in Figure 1 , in which it is obvious that the beamline is mainly devoted to the materials science and biomedical fi elds. © 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.