Digital Radiography Using Flat Panel Detector for the Non-Destructive Evaluation of Space Vehicle Components

Digital technology has been introduced into radiography very recently but the conventional film based technique will be totally out of the arena in no time as what has happened in the photography field. The state-of-art technology is direct digital X-ray imaging based on Flat Panel Detector technology in which the X-ray image is displayed on the computer without the intermediate optics or mechanical scanning. The flat panel detector (FPD) system is very compact and provides high quality digital images with better signal to noise ratio, high spatial resolution and wide dynamic range. The application of Real-time DR system for the NDE of space vehicle components is presented in this paper. The salient features of the studies on digital radiography of solid rocket motors with respect to defect sizing, spatial location and quantitative analysis are briefly described in this paper. Details of digital projection radiography technique with a mini-focus X-ray machine applied for the NDE of small pyrodevices are also discussed.