Core Capital for NXCT facility 2022

The National lab X-ray computed tomography (CT) facility (NXCT) is a national research facility (NRF) that provides access and support to users to perform X-ray CT experiments and analyse their data. We enable researchers from academia and industry to exploit the 3D, 4D and beyond imaging capabilities of X-rays. The capabilities we provide allow, for example, to watch how an additive manufacturing metal component fails under tensile testing or how a medical implant degrades when exposed to the human body. We can also measure the damage inside composites used for wind turbines and aeroplane fuselages as well as internal defects and design aspects of newly constructed batteries. This grant will upgrade many of our existing systems providing new capabilities in addition to increased bandwidth, in many cases. Investments in computing are needed to keep pace with the latest hardware, software and algorithm advances and are crucial to providing a valuable service to our users who typically spend much longer analysing their data than collecting it. The new computing resources requested will help address this major challenge for handling 3D and 4D data, not to mention the additional dimensions of phase, colour and diffraction data which we can collect in our facility. This latest grant will allow for a new lab space to be built at Warwick creating a single work space bringing together all of their X-ray capabilities which are currently spread across multiple labs, creating a great place to work for staff and users as well as achieving new benchmarks in sustainability.