Gulliver – A new kind of industrial CT

The large-scale CT system GULLIVER was recently put into operation at the Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität (RPTU) in Kaiserslautern (Germany). The project, which was launched in 2019 as a result of a competition between various German universities and research institutions, aims to use Computed Tomography (CT) to examine real-scale building components under the most realistic load conditions possible, as is customary in materials testing. The CT measurement is intended to provide new insights into the fatigue dynamics inside these concrete structures, which are up to 6 m long and 1 m wide, by detecting minimal cracks of up to 100 microns in size at the point of load application. The special design of the system and the components installed, open up completely new fields of application for high-energy CT that were previously not available. Particularly noteworthy is the system's gantry-type manipulation unit, whose use has so far been limited primarily to medical diagnostics, as well as the X-ray components used, which open up completely new fields of application for CT in terms of energy and resolution. But also, the processing of the resulting huge data of approx. 10,000 × 10,000 × 2,000 voxels generated in the system represents a particular challenge for the image processing and evaluation to be carried out following the measurement. In this publication, we present the project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and its development containing the measurement results achieved during the current completion of the system as well as the status of the processing procedures developed. In addition, the future measurement campaigns planned with the system are presented and the possibilities to access the innovative testing system for own research activities are explained.