X-ray system measures surface density

To achieve high resolution, an x-ray CT system is combined with a virtual CT system and Kolibri optical CMM system.

Computed-tomography (CT) systems can nondestructively image hidden features by reconstructing a three-dimensional (3-D) model out of two-dimensional (2-D) x-ray images, but CT systems suffer from poor dimensional accuracy. X-ray sources for CT systems emit broadband radiation rather than monochromatic radiation, resulting in different attenuation of x-ray photons with varying energies. This "beam hardening" effect occurs because of the additional attenuation exhibited by low-energy x-rays and is one of the main causes of errors in a final 3-D reconstruction.

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