After two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, the X-Ray Flow Visualization Facility, now in the testing phase, could open for business this fall.

Ted Heindel, associate professor of mechanical engineering, called the facility, which he helped design, “a lead tree house.”

The X-Ray Flow Visualization Facility is suspended 12 feet above the ground with a 20-foot Plexiglas column 12 inches in diameter running through it.

The facility is located in the Black Engineering Building and was developed by Joe Gray and Terry Jensen, physicists of the Nondestructive Evaluation Center and Heindel.

“The facility is on the verge of exiting the test-drive phase to becoming a useful tool after a few more modifications to improve it,” Jensen said.

Researchers are improving software by installing a new camera system to receive better images and plan to exit the test-drive phase as soon as the next proposal is approved by the National Science Foundation, Heindel said.

“Hopefully, the proposal will be accepted by the fall of 2005,” he said.

Jensen said the facility’s unique X-ray capabilities could benefit many industries.

For example, space shuttle parts were tested for defects in its materials. The facility was the instrument of choice because it has a large field of view and was therefore able to take X-ray images of larger objects.

Heindel said the facility is one-of-a-kind.

“This facility is unique in terms of size and the things it can do,” he said. “There is nothing like this at Iowa State.”

The facility has two X-ray imaging systems, which take images of liquids, solids and gases as they flow through a Plexiglas column. This information helps researchers to better understand and record the interactions of the materials.

“This instrument allows you to see what is happening on the inside of large objects without destroying them,” Heindel said.

There is a lot of expertise and interest in the area of multiphase flows, and there are several faculty members doing research on the topic, he said.

Those using the facility include scientists, graduate students, undergraduate students and industries.

Two graduate assistants in mechanical engineering, Jeremy Hubers and Alex Striegel, worked with the facility for their thesis projects, Heindel said. Other undergraduate students are scheduled to start using the equipment this summer and pick up where the graduate assistants left off.

The idea for the facility evolved when Heindel experimented with X-ray equipment at the Institute of Paper Science and Technology and brought his work to Iowa State in fall 2000. He then began working with Jensen and Gray to design the facility.

The facility was funded after submission and approval of the idea to the National Science Foundation’s Major Research Instrumentation Program, which donated approximately $420,000 to the project. Iowa State gave approximately $220,000 for construction, according to the university Web site. The facility design began in fall 2002 and took 1.5 years to build.