Optimization of X-Ray Computerized Tomography for Polymer Materials

Since polymers mainly consist of the light atomic elements, the transmission of polymers against X-rays is usually too high to be visualized in X-ray microscopy, and hence it has been considered that polymers are not suitable for X-ray computerized tomography (XCT). We calculate the X-ray absorption coefficients of various polymers and find reasonably good conditions for the XCT observations of polymers: the use of 15KeV X-rays on average can resolve the polystyrene (PS) and poly (methymethacrylate) (PMMA) in 3 mu m spatial resolutions. According to this calculation, we build an XCT and experimentally confirm the visualization of the phase-separation structures of PS/PMMA blends.