X-Rays Aren’t Just for Bones Anymore

Radiographic Inspection and What It Tells Us!

Most people have a good idea – not just of what X-rays are and how they’re used – but of lots of other things we could be doing with them. These ideas range from the lascivious to the fantastic, in areas like espionage and counter-intelligence to just spying on your neighbors or peering into your boss’s strong box. Since powerful and sometimes dangerous X-ray equipment came into broad use some 100 years ago, it’s only sparked imaginations and incited us to look further – and deeper. And sometimes to look again.

X-ray technology is still almost uniquely associated with the healthcare industry. Indeed, some of the most important work that X-rays allow people to do will probably always be associated with seeing into human bodies, detecting anomalies and allowing doctors to diagnose, detect and determine what to do next.

But radiography, that is, the use of electromagnetic radiation, including and especially X-rays, to see through objects, is not just for looking into bodies at broken bones.

Radiography is also commonly used for things like:

• Crystallography to study the development and growth of crystals
• Astronomy where astronomers study X-rays being emitted by stars and other objects in outer space
• Fluorescence, which allows chemists to study the compositions of metals, ceramics, building materials and glass
• Computed tomography (CT) in which three-dimensional representations of components can be produced directly from X-ray images

Even in art history, paintings are analyzed to see how and why pigments degrade or breakdown, or even what revisions a painting may have gone through while the artist was working on it. Museums and art restoration laboratories will often subject paintings to radiography tests to see what it is they’re dealing with in a given painting.

Industrial Radiography

Among the most common uses for radiographic imaging are in making sure that the things around you are safe, safe to use, and that they’re put together well. The things you use every day, from cars and bridges to your refrigerator and other appliances in the home, all get subjected to X-rays long before they’re put to use. Sometimes, as with bridges, they’ll be X-rayed again and again, in order to make sure they’re still safe and still holding up suitably to carry traffic and heavy loads.

Essentially, just like would happen in the hospital with a radiologist, technicians equipped with radiographic equipment inspect and peer into all kinds of manufactured and industrial components in order to make sure they’re not suffering from some structural defect that could cause them to fail, break, decompose or fall apart with regular use. Just about everything around us has an expected “life-span” and X-ray technology allows us to better predict how long the useful life of these objects will be.

Electronics Inspection

As electronic components continue to appear in every possible area of our lives, the solders and semi-conductors inside of every component get increasingly frequent doses of X-rays. This allows manufacturers to see more of what is in there, and to avoid having to tear their components apart. This can include semi-conductor wafers, but all backplanes, and complete electronic interfaces. It’s often done right in the factory and sometimes right on the production line.

Food Production

The same goes for food production lines. Radiography is increasingly common in advanced and industrial areas of production where technicians can watch for foreign objects or contaminants.

Wheels and Tires

Tires are often made up of a combination of synthetic and natural rubbers, plus steel cords and other materials. Re-treading or re-using them can open a whole new range of risks in terms of defects and manufacturing worries. Radiography keeps that risk to a minimum and is often used on every tire leaving a production line.

Recycling

Speaking of re-using tires, recycling anything else is often made a lot easier with radiography where metals and other materials can be carefully or examined or simply sorted according to their makeup.

Types of Radiographic Inspection

Magna Chek uses a whole range of radiographic equipment to better see and see into the component we’re examining every day. The equipment allows us to do X-Rays and Real Time X-Rays (with a digital imaging system) and Real Time Radiography. We also do Gamma Ray inspections for deeper penetration into some materials including as much as 3.5 inches of solid steel. We can also do CT scans, that, as mentioned above, allow us to produce three-dimensional models. This is particularly important in some areas of flaw detection or failure analysis and where understanding the internal dynamics of a given material are particularly important.