Traceable Porosity Measurements in Industrial Components Using X-Ray Computed Tomography

Manufacturing technologies deliver products that can suffer from various defects, one of which is internal porosity. Pores are present in most of the parts produced by, e.g., casting, additive manufacturing, and injection molding and can significantly affect the performance of the final products. Due to technological and economic limits, typically porosity cannot be completely removed by optimizing process parameters. It is therefore essential to have a measurement technique that can detect and evaluate these defects accurately. Apart from conventional nondestructive techniques, such as ultrasonic testing or Archimedes’ method that suffer from various limitations, X-ray computed tomography has emerged as a promising solution capable of measuring size, spatial distribution, and shape of pores. In this paper, a method to achieve traceable computed tomography measurements of internal porosity using a reference object with calibrated internal artificial defects is described and demonstrated on an industrial case study. Furthermore, the possibility to improve measurement results by optimizing parameters used for the evaluation of acquired data is discussed. The optimization method is based on an iterative procedure that reduces to ±5 × 10⁻⁵ mm³ the error of the measured values of total void content in the reference object.