Enhancing Industrial Inspection with Efficient Edge Illumination X-Ray Phase Contrast Simulations

X-ray imaging is routinely used in non-destructive testing, where x-ray projections of an object are compared to a ground truth to detect anomalies. This ground truth can be simulated x-ray projections of a computer-aided design model of the object. While conventional x-ray imaging excels at distinguishing high from low absorbing materials, x-ray phase contrast imaging delivers higher contrast between different low absorbing materials. However, this requires efficient x-ray phase contrast imaging compatible computer-aided design projection simulation software, to generate the ground truth images. Currently available x-ray phase contrast imaging simulation tools are either notoriously slow Monte-Carlo simulators, or equally slow explicit wavefront propagation simulators. In this work, a recently developed computer-aided design projector toolbox is used to model the edge illumination x-ray phase contrast imaging setup within a GPU-based ray tracing framework, significantly speeding up simulations. Results for two industrial samples are shown. One has artificially introduced defects and the other is compared to a real edge illumination acquisition, demonstrating the potential to accurately and efficiently simulate phase contrast images, directly from a computer-aided design model. This paves the way for edge illumination to be applied in non-destructive testing.