Taking a close look, whatever the scale
Following the 50 km/h crash test, all that was left of the car was a heap of metal – one that contains valuable information on how vehicle safety could be improved. But the only way engineers can get at this information is if they can see inside the vehicle to analyze how its individual components reacted to the force of the impact. The typical two-dimensional X-ray images used in conventional materials testing are often not accurate enough, as what they show is no more than a kind of shadow-picture taken from a single angle. Computed tomography (CT) offers researchers many more possibilities for examining components: By recording parts in all three dimensions, it allows them to be measured and inspected in a contact-free and non-destructive way. But how do you fit an entire car into a CT scanner?