A novel energy resolved X-ray computed tomography instrument for aviation security: Preliminary metrological investigation

The development of new high flux photon counting detectors (PCDs) opens the opportunity to implement energy dispersive x-ray computed tomography (XCT) systems in aviation security. This paper presents a novel prototype of an energy dispersive XCT instrument for research applications. The paper describes the instrument design and operational parameters along with a preliminary metrological investigation using a reference artefact, the CT tube, by visualisation and comparison to measurements on a coordinate measurement machine (CMM). The paper demonstrates how this novel CT instrument can, using only an extremely sparse number of 20 projections, both visualise the reference artefact with a 1 mm voxel size and be used to estimate distances with deviation from CMM around or less than half the voxel size (± 0.5 mm). This paper show that the novel prototype XCT instrument could be used to demonstrate the feasibility of a full-sized scanner design for future aviation security.