Tungsten alloy collimators are highly favored in the field of ray control primarily because their property system achieves a high degree of unity among shielding effectiveness, environmental durability, and application flexibility—significantly surpassing traditional lead-based or other metal collimators.
Tungsten alloy collimators possess outstanding ray attenuation capability. This stems mainly from tungsten’s high atomic number and the high density of tungsten alloys. Tungsten’s atomic number ranks among the highest of common metals, giving it strong photoelectric absorption and scattering cross-sections for X-rays and γ-rays. With a density higher than that of lead, tungsten alloy requires significantly thinner material thickness to achieve equivalent shielding effectiveness, enabling lighter and more compact collimator designs.
Tungsten alloy collimators offer excellent machinability and structural stability. While pure tungsten has exceptional attenuation performance, it is highly brittle and difficult to form steep, dense multi-channel structures. After alloying, toughness and ductility are markedly improved, allowing high-precision milling, drilling, electrical discharge machining, or ultrasonic processing to create complex geometric hole arrays and high aspect-ratio channels. This manufacturability provides designers with broad flexibility, enabling highly customized structural optimization based on specific field-of-view, beam spot shape, and resolution requirements. At the same time, tungsten alloy exhibits virtually no performance degradation or geometric distortion under long-term irradiation, temperature-humidity cycling, or chemical corrosion, ensuring the collimator maintains initial precision throughout its full lifecycle.
Tungsten alloy collimators are environmentally friendly and non-toxic, fundamentally eliminating health and environmental risks associated with lead during use, processing, and disposal—fully compliant with stringent biosafety and environmental regulations for medical devices, clean laboratories, and nuclear instruments.
In terms of functionality, tungsten alloy collimators demonstrate strong directional beam-shaping capability. Through the synergistic action of high-attenuation solids and precision channels, they effectively constrain divergent ray beams into highly directional collimated beams with low stray radiation. Flexible control of channel geometry allows both narrow fields of view to suppress background noise and moderate widening to balance flux; they can produce circular, rectangular, or fan-shaped beam spots and, through multi-leaf or focused structures, achieve dynamic beam shaping—meeting diverse needs from wide-field imaging to pencil-beam therapy. Secondary radiation suppression is also excellent: rational composition ratios and microstructured inner walls significantly reduce the generation and escape of characteristic X-rays and scattered photons, further improving beam purity.
From the perspective of application and cost-effectiveness, tungsten alloy collimators exhibit high scenario adaptability and full-lifecycle advantages. Through minor composition adjustments and structural variations, they can simultaneously satisfy the lightweight and biocompatible requirements of medical equipment, the high-flux and vibration-resistant needs of industrial testing, and the ultra-high shielding and cleanliness demands of nuclear instruments.
