x-ray

S

sigurd

Joined
Jun 24, 2000
Messages
47
has anyone used x-ray or other probing techniques to determine impurities in knives?

The reason I ask is that my father works at a rolls-royce factory producing huge machine parts and they use some kind of machine to look for potential weaknesses.

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Wheres the mithril I was told about?
sigurdgrung@hotmail.com
 
X-rays imaging is often used in expensive machinery parts. The company my father worked for used x-ray controlling for turbine parts, but as far as I remember, you need extensive radiation protection against the x-rays. They seemed to use heavy radiation doses. I wouldn´t wanna risk getting cancer cause I needed to see that my knives didn´t have any quality faults, but some knife nuts probably will
smile.gif

If someone has acces to medical x-ray machines, I would be highly interested in knowing if they could be used for quality control issues.

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"Peace is not without conflict; it is the ability to cope with conflict" - Leo Giron
 
Im sure they are not standing in the same rooms as the machines. I will try to pursuade my dad to get some samples xrayed at the factory. I will report back.
 
X-ray for use in detecting microscopic cracks in metals is not the same as medical x-ray systems. The detection equipment is entirely different, as metal does not pass x-ray through it like flesh and bone do. I don't know how applicable this is to knives, as they do not see anywhere near the same stresses as the components which are generally examined in this way.

--JB

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e_utopia@hotmail.com
 
Just hope they have enough zoom or whatever. I think they use it mostly for huge things, looking for air bubbles. Would be interesting to see damasc through it, maybe.
 
We don't use industrial imaging at the hospital but I'll try some techniques tomorrow night and get back to you.
 
"hard" X-ray is used to check for "voids" within steel (deadly for a turbine blade).
Ultrasonic is used to check for inconsistency (tiny inner cracks, impurities, faults in the structure and the like).
Fluorescence test is used for microscopically fine "surface defects" (micro-cracks, e.g.).
Happy testing
smile.gif


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D.T. UTZINGER
 
X-raying is one of the methods (along with others as mentioned by Zut) that are routinely employed by military aviation maintenance technicians to conduct non-destructive inspections (NDI) of critical airframe components. They use specially shielded booths that are specifically designed to safely contain the high doses of radiation required to "see" through the larger components being tested. Although I'm not intimately familiar with the actual operation of this equipment, I'm aware of no reason why a knife blade couldn't be tested for inclusions or imperfections in the same manner that a landing gear strut is tested. The cost of performing these tests may be somewhat prohibitive, but that's a separate issue.

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Semper Fi

-Bill
 
allenC,
cool you tried it. What exactly didn´t work out, if I may ask?

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"Peace is not without conflict; it is the ability to cope with conflict" - Leo Giron
 
I'm just guessing, but I wouldn't think that hospital x-ray equipment would be powerful enough for use on a knife blade.

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Semper Fi

-Bill
 
There is a portable machine called a Texas Instrument Alloy Analyzer that can give the make up of steels. It uses an x-ray emitter along the lines of spectrometer. A software program compares this with elements in its database to make determinations. Testing labs have this device.
 
Medical x-ray is an entirely differnt animal from x-ray detection of flaws in metals. Medical x-ray works by passing the x-rays through the object, and detecting them on the other side, with either film or a digital array (my dentist has one of those; pretty nice to have instant x-rays, without developing). Examining metal is done by several techniques, but usually detects the x-rays reflected back toward the emitter, effectively making it the opposite of medical x-ray.

--JB

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e_utopia@hotmail.com
 
I could not get a technique (contrast and density) that could penetrate the steel blade, so it appears on the film as "white" with no variation.
Some metals are easy to penetrate (it depends on their thickness and atomic number); aluminum is easier to penetrate than lead.
The tricky part is to penetrate the blade enough to demonstrate variations in the metal but not over-penetrate and "burn through" those variations. That's just penetration, density (the blackness of the film) is another problem altogether.
I might be able to try CT or Specials since their generators are more powerful.
 
Thank you all for analytical enlightenment.

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"Peace is not without conflict; it is the ability to cope with conflict" - Leo Giron
 
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