Abstract

Synchrotron computed microtomography provides rapid 3-D imaging with micron scale resolution. It can be done using either a narrow energy bandwidth for element-specific imaging, or with a wide energy bandwidth for very rapid data acquisition. Applications are very wide-ranging, including biological tissues, materials deformation under applied stress, fluid flow in porous media, and studies of the internal structure of meteorites. This talk will present an overview of the technique, and selected applications mainly in the field of earth science.

Figure 1. Tomography slice through a natural sandstone which has been deformed in the laboratory. This is one slice from a 1920x1920x1200 voxel dataset. The voxels are 2.70 micron cubes, and this dataset required less than 60 seconds to collect. The deformation resulted in a fault with fractured grains running from the lower left to upper right in this slice.