GraeaeX

Realism is a function of scale, resolution, material properties, and imaging capability. To approach realism—namely provide adequate visualization or representation for any material whether it be ant anatomy or 3D printed steel—requires having the imaging capability at the appropriate scale and spatial resolution. A new field of 3D X-ray microscopy (XRM) has emerged bringing dramatic resolution and contrast improvements to X-ray tomographic imaging. Analogous to computed tomography (CT), a specimen can be imaged without physical sectioning and a complete 3D view of the object is generated. Yet X-ray microscopes provide superior spatial resolution down to the nanoscale and tunable phase contrast to image materials such as nanoscale pores in filtration membranes or entire model organisms such as zebrafish ex vivo up to tens of centimeters in size. This is possible because laboratory-based X-ray sources have been coupled with high resolution optically coupled detectors and in some cases X-ray focusing optics to acquire tomographic datasets with resolution down to 50 nm across a great span of sample dimensions.

This talk highlights the imaging capability of a 3D XRM with application highlights from materials and life sciences. In the first example, tomographic data was collected by ZEISS Xradia 520 Versa of an ant specimen (Adetomyrma bressleri) for morphological studies to resolve species phylogeny. In this case, to ‘approach realism’ required intuitive and advanced visualization by GraeaeX. Secondly, for materials research, datasets collected at nanoscale resolution by Xradia 810 Ultra provided realistic microstructure input to improve computational transport models for polymer electrolyte fuel cells. Coupled with advanced visualization methods, three-dimensional X-ray microscopy (XRM) is a powerful sub-surface imaging technique that reveals tomography of microstructure from a range of materials, non-destructively.