X-ray microtomography

In this tutorial, we describe X-ray microtomography as a technique to nondestructively characterize material microstructure in three dimensions at a micron level spatial resolution. While commercially available laboratory scale instrumentation is available, we focus our attention on synchrotron-based systems, where we can exploit a high flux, monochromatic X-ray beam to produce high fidelity three-dimensional images. A brief description of the physics and the mathematical analysis behind the technique is followed by example applications to specific materials characterization problems, with a particular focus on the utilization of three-dimensional image processing that can be used to extract a wide range of useful information.