Performance of a focused 2D anti-scatter grid for industrial X-ray computed tomography

X-ray computed tomography (XCT) is increasingly being used for the measurement and inspection of large dense metallic engineering components. When scanning such components, the quality of the data is degraded by the presence of scattered radiation. In this work, the performance of a focused 2D anti-scatter grid (ASG) is investigated for scanning samples made from cobalt chrome and Inconel on a 450 kV cone-beam XCT system. The devised scatter correction method requires one additional scan of the sample, and for projections to be algorithmically processed prior to reconstruction. The results show that the ASG based scatter correction method increases the contrast-to-noise of the data by 14.5% and 61.5% for the cobalt chrome and Inconel samples, respectively. Furthermore, the method increases edge sharpness by 6% and 16.9% for outer and inner edges, respectively.