Dynamic 3D X-ray micro-CT data of a tablet dissolution in a water-based gel

Summary

This submission contains a dynamic tomographic X-ray data of a tablet dissolving in a water-based gel. The data is collected over a 5-minute period during which the sample is rotated rapidly as effervescent bubbles are formed and travelling to the surface of the gel.

The data is made available as part of Case Study 3 in [Coban 2020].

Apparatus

The dataset is acquired using the custom-built and highly flexible CT scanner, FleX-ray Laboratory, developed by TESCAN-XRE, located at CWI in Amsterdam. This apparatus consists of a cone-beam microfocus X-ray point source that projects polychromatic X-rays onto a 1944-by-1536 pixels, 14-bit, flat detector panel. Full details can be found in [Coban 2020].

Sample Information

The setup consists of a store-bought denture cleaning tablet, placed at the bottom of a clear cylindrical plastic container. These tablets are typically designed to be fast-dissolving, and produce small and compact channels of bubbles. We use a denture cleaning tablet in particular as the dissolution time in water varies from 3 to 5 minutes, meaning the bubbles are produced at a slower rate. In addition, we use a store-bought water-based gel instead of water to slow down the bubble displacement during the experiment.

Experimental Plan

This experiment is performed such that 120 projections are collected over 360 degrees, for a total of 83 rotations, with exposure time 30 ms for each projection. This means that in total the submission contains 10000 projections. This took a total of 5 minutes of acquisition time, during which the tablet moved due to saturation but did not completely dissolve. The spatial resolution is 95μm, and the field of view was cropped to the boundaries of the sample holder (each projection image is of size 647px×768px). Our experimental setup allowed the collection of open and closed shutter (flat- and dark-field) images before decanting the gel onto the tablet. No centrifugal force effect was observed on the bubbles travelling during the scan or in our test runs at the given rotational speed.

All raw data (i.e. no corrections) is made available in .tif format.

List of Contents

The contents of the submission is given below.

• scan: A 5-minute dynamic CT data folder containing
  • dark-field (or closed-shutter) image, di000000.tif,
  • pre flat-field (or open-shutter before acquisition) image, io000000.tif,
  • post flat-field (or open-shutter after acquisition) image, io000001.tif,
  • raw (unprocessed or uncorrected) projections, scan_*.tif (10000 projections in total),
  • data settings XRE.txt, a text file with scanner metadata,
  • script.txt and script_executed.txt are the text files containing the list of commands the apparatus has executed.

Additional Links

These datasets are produced by the Computational Imaging group at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CI-CWI). For any relevant Python/MATLAB scripts for the FleX-ray datasets, we refer the reader to our group's GitHub page.

Contact Details

For more information or guidance in using these dataset, please get in touch with 

• s.b.coban [at] cwi.nl

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Samuel McDonald and Prof. Philip Withers for the useful discussion, and Dr. Manuel Dierick for his advice in making this experiment possible.