Working for Rolls Royce

Industrial microCT Tilted-angle laminography Scatter reduction CAD 3D printing Non-destructive examination

Tilted-angle laminography and scatter reduction are the two principal methods that I employed while working on an X-ray imaging project for Rolls Royce at $\mu$-VIS X-ray Imaging Centre. The goal was to optimally image a dense metallic part under development for a next-generation jet engine.

This particular part was challenging to image with X-ray micro-computed tomography ($\mu$CT) because it was tabular in shape and made of a very dense metal. These two properties call for two advanced approaches when it comes to $\mu$CT imaging:

Tilted angle laminography (TAL) is an unconventional method to position the part with respect to the X-ray gun and detector in order to minimise the X-ray path through the part. To perform TAL, I designed and 3D-printed a bracket for accurate positioning of the part inside the CT scanner. I then formulated a mathematical representation of the geometry and customized an open-source CT reconstruction package for this purpose.

X-ray Compton scattering inevitably occurs when high X-ray energies are employed to penetrate dense materials. I used an experimental approach to estimate and remove the scatter that involved designing a perforated lead sheet and subsequent image processing.

Combining the two methods enabled Rolls Royce to put a workflow together for non-destructive examination (NDE) of parts designed for next-generation jet engines with high performance and reliability.