Ultralightweight, Low Expansion, Feber Reinforced SiC Composite Lithography Stage

Not Available Recent advances in the cold cathodes, e.g. diamond thin films, have opened several new areas where the power hungry thermionic filaments can be replaced by these efficient cathodes. One such example is the x-ray sources widely used for imaging and non-destructive evaluation (NDE) of structural materials and composites. X-ray tubes, originally developed at the turn of 20th century have not seen many changes in their basic design. The high current capability of diamond field emitters, for the first time, offers the potential to eliminate the heated cathodes and the introduction of microeletronic processing for fabricating innovative array x-ray sources . We propose to use the diamond cold cathodes to develop innovative conformable, two dimensional, fully addressable, multi-pixel x-ray array sources that can be used with array x-ray detectors to construct complete NDE systems. These sources will allow development of low mass, compact, portable and specialized imaging systems with very high sensitivity for NDE of various materials and components for military material evaluation applications. In phase I project, we will demonstrate the feasibility of this concept by fabricating a 10 x 10 pixel array x-ray source. In phase II, a complete NDE system useful for structural materials and composites will be developed.