Sweet Ride

by Txchnologist staff

Sometimes you need to get a peek at what’s under the hood and your eyes just won’t cut it. Or maybe you need to get a detailed view of what’s inside a loaded shipping container. That’s why researchers at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits have developed a massive computed tomography (CT) scanner to image objects as big as airplane wings and cargo-ship containers.

The picture above is an early fruit of their labors–an automobile’s smallest components, as they sit in their actual positions, become visible using the technique. Click here to see a full-sized version of the image. Read more to learn how it works.

The device, called an XXL CT scanner, can resolve objects as small as 0.03 inches (0.8 mm) long in an imaging process that creates detailed X-ray slices stacked on top of each other. They hope to improve resolution to half that soon.

The scanner, which doesn’t destroy or contact the subject it is imaging, could be important for all sorts of forensic uses. The scientists point to detailed inspections of damage after car crash tests as one example.

They say the XXL works by hoisting an object onto a giant turntable. The object is bombarded from one side by X-rays while a four-meter-long detector picks up the radiation on the other. A computer constructs a three-dimensional image from the detector’s readings.

“We have never been able to carry out non-destructive materials testing on this scale before,” Randolf Hanke, director of Fraunhofer’s Development Center for X-ray Technology, said in a statement.