Beaming Jeep up

Work has begun on building the Joint Engineering, Environmental and Processing (Jeep) beamline facility at the Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire.

Once complete, Jeep will enable dense engineering components weighing up to 2 tonnes and measuring up to 1m to be placed under Diamond's X-ray beam.

It will allow researchers to understand better how com-ponents are affected by production processes and treatments and how products and systems react to strain, ageing or fatigue.

Using imaging and tomography, X-ray diffraction and Small Angle X-ray Scattering, researchers will extend Jeep's use to study biosamples such as bone or even soft tissue.

'Jeep will provide flexibility in the type and complexity of the experiments it can accommodate,' said Dr Michael Drakopoulos, principal Beamline scientist. 'One of the benefits Jeep will provide is the ability to produce successive 3D pictures of the internal volume of engineering components, similar to the techniques used for CAT scans, allowing researchers to study and measure such things as stress corrosion cracks.

'Techniques such as this can potentially help companies within the engineering industry to advance their performance.'

The Jeep beamline will be made up of two hutches that contain the experimental instruments, sample positioners and detectors.

The first hutch will open to users in late 2009 and the second in 2010.