Toray develops durable scintillator panel for high-speed nondestructive X-ray inspection

Toray Industries announced that it has developed a highly durable short-afterglow scintillator panel that speeds up nondestructive X-ray inspection and improves its operational efficiency. The company launched the product in Japan and abroad in June 2024.

Companies often use nondestructive X-ray inspection to ensure the quality of key products such as semiconductors, electronic components and food. Defects or contamination can cause major social problems. These problems include infrastructure disruptions, automobile accidents and health hazards. The market for X-ray inspection systems should grow by about 10% per year. Key growth drivers are the expansion of product inspection ranges, the expansion of inspection targets, and the adoption of full in-line inspection.

Fast movement of products and cameras and high-speed image capture reduce item inspection time. The disadvantage of scintillator panels using general-purpose terbium-doped gadolinium oxysulfide (GOS) phosphors is image blurring, such as smearing in the transmission direction. Praseodymium-doped GOS phosphors have a short afterglow time, which can make images clear. But they are not as bright as terbium-doped GOS phosphors. Another challenge is that non-destructive high-speed X-ray inspections are often performed around the clock, and X-ray radiation can erode the brightness of the scintillator panels, increasing the frequency of X-ray detector replacement.

Toray has improved the initial brightness of the scintillator panels by 21% by using a highly reflective proprietary base film. By identifying and addressing the cause of brightness degradation, the brightness after accelerated testing is 30% higher than conventional technology.