For companies whose business is to manufacture and supply any kind of parts, industrial CT scanning inspection services are sure to be a top priority. Companies that are looking to decrease their new product inspection costs as well as their failure analysis costs will find that they can cut these costs between 25 and 75 percent by using the industrial CT scanning process as compared to the previously existing technology.
CT scanning was invented by Godfrey Hounsfield of EMI Laboratories and by a physicist named Allan Cormack of Tufts University in Massachusettes. The British engineer Hounsfield and the South African-born Cormack were awarded the Nobel Prize for their contributions to medicine and science. Between the years 1974 to 1976, the first clinical CT scanners were installed. Originally, the first CT scanners were dedicated to scanning and imaging the head only, but by 1976, larger openings were designed in order to fit a patient’s entire body into the scanner enabling doctors to scan and image the whole patient. By the year 1980, CT became much more widely available. There are now over 6,000 CT scanners installed in the United States and roughly 30,000 systems installed around the world.
What is most remarkable about CT scanning technology is how far it has grown in the last 40 years. When Hounsfield developed his first scanner in his lab at EMI, it took several hours for it to acquire the raw data needed to make up a single scan. This single scan is called a “slice” and from this slice a single image would be reconstructed. This process of reconstructing a single image took several days. Today, a multi-slice CT system typically collects up to four slices of data in about 350 ms and can reconstruct a 512 x 512- matrix image from literally millions of data points in less than a second.
CT scanning technology remains vital in its ability to assist medical professionals as a diagnostic tool. It has also been adapted and used very effectively in industrial ct scanning inspection services. Just like in the medical arena, the technology in the realm of industrial scanning has improved dramatically over the years. In the beginning, a few single CT slices would take hours, even days, to generate. Now it is possible to reconstruct 3D model that have billions of voxels in mere seconds.
Industrial CT scanning inspection services make the inspection process efficient, clear and understandable. The technology employed creates better pictures and reconstructs data with more acurracy. Instead of losing time with inefficient inspection methods, industrial CT scanning brings companies into the 21st Century and increases production and delivery.
