Neutron imaging makes it possible to inspect thick metal parts in airplanes and other large machinery that must be extremely reliable. It can identify issues inside components that cannot be seen with other methods like X-rays. Take a look inside the facility with us.
Welcome to the Phoenix Neutron Imaging Center. My name is Katie. I am going to give you a tour of what we do here at Phoenix. We are one of the only facilities in the world to provide commercial grade neutron imaging services to the aerospace and defense industry and others for nondestructive tests. It's a test that allows manufacturers to look inside really critical components and parts to make sure that they're operating as designed.
One of the things that we do at the imaging center is we image what are called energetic devices. The way those parts are formed is it's like a thick metal housing with light amounts of explosives on the inside. X-rays are really, really good at finding dense, heavy things in softer materials. Neutrons behave in the opposite way. So you have that thick metal shell with that lighter, hydrogen rich explosive material on the inside, and manufacturers need to make sure that that material is layered and organized within that part exactly how it was designed, or else it might not fire.
The other course of business that we have is imaging turbine blades that go into the jet engine of airplanes. One of the more important things that we do day to day is we receive these materials. We are certified to handle all of that explosive material and move it to our facility accordingly. So this is our fixturing area.
Our team works really closely with each and every customer to make sure that we design the fixture in the test in a way that everything that needs to be seen can be seen very clearly, and that's what we're getting to our customers is that quality assurance. So Energetics fixturing has its own bunker and that's because it is explosive materials.
These require anywhere between 20 minutes and 2 hours of fixturing time, because they often are very small. And they have to be positioned extremely specifically within the imaging box. This is where all the neutron imaging happens. So the neutrons are produced within the center of this big blue structure. This is called a moderator. So it's moderating down the speed of those neutrons using a combination of heavy water plastic, other such stuff.
We do ten images concurrently. So we got our cassettes here. The cassettes can be, landscape or portrait loaded up according to the instructions. All of our customers have different needs, and a lot of the parts have different needs, so here to accommodate that. One of the unique things about our system as compared to our competitors is we're an accelerator based neutron producing system.
Everybody else in the industry uses research reactors to make those neutrons. There are only a handful of research reactors left, in the United States, and only three in the US and one in Canada. That will actually provide neutron imaging services. But again, this facility was purpose built to do neutron imaging for those components. We can turn the system off, stop making neutrons.
It becomes immediately safe from a radiation perspective. We can open the system up, repair what needs to be repaired, close it the imaging. Same day a reactor goes down, we'll get a lot of energy, materials and turbine blades all at the same time. So having a facility that can house and process all of that was incredibly important. And not only that, we have the capability to image almost all of the energetic materials that require neutron imaging, across the United States year over year, just out of this facility.
Almost 100% of neutron imaging done commercially is done on film. So that requires us to have a darkroom. After they're developed, they come over to the image viewing area. So if you've ever had a chest or dental X-ray, this might look pretty familiar. neutron images are black and white, but unlike an X-ray, there's certain things you can see in neutron image that you otherwise wouldn't be able to see, neutrons that you can see with this tin of Altoids, you can easily see through the metal tin, but you can see each of the individual sort of, candy pellets that's in here.
So this shows that you can really have very high contrast to expose the material through metal containers. That concludes the tour of the Phoenix Neutron Imaging Center. We've talked through the importance of material handling. We went into the bunker where we produced the radiation and all the neutrons that we need in order to produce a high-quality neutron image, the sheer reliability of the system and how different it is and everything else that's out there doing, how we can have 99% uptime. All of this speaks to the things that are most important to us. As you can see in the banner behind me, the safety, quality and on time. That's it. Thank you for taking the time to tour with us.
