It’s no wonder that we traditionally associate x-rays and CT scans with medical purposes. After all, we see x-rays and CT machines on television every day; they’re certainly popular features on medical dramas, and are indeed often used in real life to inspect various medical conditions, and they can indeed save lives. With that being said, that’s not the only reason why we use x-ray inspection and CT scanning on a regular basis. They all serve industrial purposes, as is the case with industrial xray inspection and industrial CT scanning inspections. These can be used under many different guises; sometimes, they are implemented to protect our security. There’s a reason why people have to put their luggage through inspection at airports, after all. They can also scan for “bugs”, and much more. On a basic level, industrial xray inspections often serve to look for flaws in construction before products go to market. This is because they can scan a wide number of products, in a vast array of shapes and sizes. But there’s more to these services than even that, and to fully understand them you need to not only comprehend their capabilities, but how they were created.

A Brief History Of Scanning Services

X-rays are the products of electromagnetic radiation, and are therefore naturally occurring. However, they were not discovered until 1895. it would not officially be harnessed or used until later on. CT scanning, on the other hand, wasn’t used until much later on. Godfrey Hounsfield of EMI Laboratories in England and Allan Cormack of Tufts University, Massachusetts invented CT in 1972. They would later be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their contributions to science and medicine. However, the first clinical scanners would not be installed until sometime between 1974 and 1976, as they required a large amount of development and testing. Originally, the scanning systems were used only for “head imaging”, with whole body systems only becoming available in 1976. By 1980, it was widely available. This is all a fairly quick progression, actually — by the standards of medicine at least. Now, the U.S. has around 6,000 CT scanners installed, and there are 30,000 installed worldwide. The first CT scanner developed by Hounsfield and his lab was fairly primitive. It took several hours to acquire a single scan, or “slice”. A whole image took days to process. Now, CT scanners can collect up to four slices of data in 350 ms, 512 x 512-matrix images can be reconstructed from millions of data points in less than a second. The capabilities of both industrial CT machines and industrial xray inspection services have progressed remarkably quickly, as you’ll see below.

Industrial Scanning Services: Their Capabilities

A lot of focus has been placed on progressing the development of industrial xray inspection and CT scanning services. This is due to their value in the fields of security and quality control, among other things. In fact, xrays can be taken in at the rate of 30 frames per second. Of course, industrial CT scanning is progressing very quickly as well. As previously mentioned, it once took hours or days to process certain images. Now, 3D models with billions of voxels can be processed in seconds. This allows for the progression of applications like 3D reverse engineering, rapid prototyping, 3D metrology, and even more. With CT machines, the best application is often that which scans for flaws in machinery and technology equipment. As mentioned before, it doesn’t matter how big or small parts are — whether you’re using a CT scanner machine or an x-ray machine. Remember, just because CT machines have certain applications doesn’t mean that x-rays are obsolete. Parts as small as .5 mm in length and as big as 66 mm in diameter x1m in length can be digitally x-rayed.

Now that you know a bit more about x-ray and CT technology, you can perhaps better appreciate the knowledge they give us.