With over 200 kg, and just over a meter high, we recently delivered the biggest neutron collimator we have built until now. The picture shows the first out of six collimators for IMAT (Imaging and Materials Science & Engineering) at ISIS, with an apple for scale. This double converging collimator has an angular coverage of 56° in the vertical and 36° in the horizontal direction. It is densely packed with 361 gadolinium oxide (Gd2O3) coated blades spaced 0.1˚ apart. At the instrument, there will be two banks of seven large pixelated diffraction detectors, installed at 90 degree scattering angles. To obtain a higher resolution in neutron diffraction experiments, the collimator array will be placed in front of these large detectors.
IMAT is a neutron imaging and diffraction instrument for materials science, materials processing and engineering. It is a part of the ISIS neutron and muon facility. The instrument will be used for energy-selective neutron imaging, and a combination of neutron imaging and spatially resolved neutron diffraction. More information about this instrument can be found here.
The combination of these techniques allows for a variety of experiments such as radiography, neutron tomography, energy-selective imaging, neutron strain scanning, crystallographic structure and phase analysis and texture analysis.
With this wide range of imaging and diffraction techniques, this instrument is useful for scientist with backgrounds in the fields of aerospace and transportation, civil engineering, power generation, earth sciences, cultural heritage, agriculture and much more.
We are proud to contribute to these fields by providing our instrumentation and we would like to thank ISIS, and especially the people from IMAT for the fruitful collaboration. The need for these long blades required optimization of our techniques and tools. Because of these developments, we can now offer these large collimators in our standard product range.
More information about our collimators can be found here.
