3D Additive Manufacturing Symposium & Workshop

The IMI /3M BIC 3D Additive Manufacturing Symposium and Workshop was hosted by 3M Buckley Innovation Centre on March 17th 2015. The event was attended by the major players in precision engineering, 3D additive design and manufacturing: Representatives from EOS, Renishaw, HK 3D Printing IMI Plc Senior Management team, design engineers, programmers and academics from the University of Huddersfield School of Art Design & Architecture, 3M Buckley centre 3D printing management and designers shared their experiences and latest solutions to expand the potential of innovation and professional enterprise for design, prototyping and manufacturing. This publication showcases the keynote innovation presentations given at the IMI/3M BIC 3D Additive Manufacturing symposium. The main themes included focus on research, design, concept actualisation, prototyping, and engineering solutions. This is a unique visual documentary of the evolutions in additive manufacturing and provides a snaphsot of latest 3D technology solutions in 2015

Time resolution of the plastic scintillator strips with matrix photomultiplier readout for J-PET tomograph

Recent tests of a single module of the Jagiellonian Positron Emission Tomography system (J-PET) consisting of 30 cm long plastic scintillator strips have proven its applicability for the detection of annihilation quanta (0.511 MeV) with a coincidence resolving time (CRT) of 0.266 ns. The achieved resolution is almost by a factor of two better with respect to the current TOF-PET detectors and it can still be improved since, as it is shown in this article, the intrinsic limit of time resolution for the determination of time of the interaction of 0.511 MeV gamma quanta in plastic scintillators is much lower. As the major point of the article, a method allowing to record timestamps of several photons, at two ends of the scintillator strip, by means of matrix of silicon photomultipliers (SiPM) is introduced. As a result of simulations, conducted with the number of SiPM varying from 4 to 42, it is shown that the improvement of timing resolution saturates with the growing number of photomultipliers, and that the 2 x 5 configuration at two ends allowing to read twenty timestamps, constitutes an optimal solution. The conducted simulations accounted for the emission time distribution, photon transport and absorption inside the scintillator, as well as quantum efficiency and transit time spread of photosensors, and were checked based on the experimental results. Application of the 2 x 5 matrix of SiPM allows for achieving the coincidence resolving time in positron emission tomography of $\approx$ 0.170 ns for 15 cm axial field-of-view (AFOV) and $\approx$ 0.365 ns for 100 cm AFOV. The results open perspectives for construction of a cost-effective TOF-PET scanner with significantly better TOF resolution and larger AFOV with respect to the current TOF-PET modalities.Comment: To be published in Phys. Med. Biol. (26 pages, 17 figures