X-ray tomography on plasmas with arbitrary cross sections and limited access

An x-ray imaging system is described for 2D reconstructions of plasmas with viewing access limitations. A relatively small number of 72 detectors distributed over six fan arrays first provides partial views of the toroidal plasma in a poloidal plane. Next, the line-integrated data is deconvoluted using a computerized tomographic approach based on linear algebra and a least-squares fit. The arrangement and the number of detectors have been optimized to the point where significant reconstruction improvements are limited by available viewing access rather than by the number of lines of sight.