Post-doctoral position on X-ray tomography in additive manufacturing (beamlines PSICHÉ and ANATOMIX, project AIQuAM3D)

SOLEIL is the French national synchrotron facility, located on the Saclay Plateau near Paris. It is a multi-disciplinary instrument and a research laboratory, whose mission is to run research programs using synchrotron radiation, to develop state-of-the-art instrumentation on the beamlines, and to make those available to the scientific community. SOLEIL, a unique tool for both academic research and industrial applications across a wide range of disciplines including physics, biology, chemistry etc., is used by over 5 000 researchers coming from France and abroad. The facility is a “public” company employing about 500 people, founded by the CNRS and the CEA, and partner of the Paris-Saclay University.

SOLEIL is a partner in the Franco-German project AIQuAM3D. This project aims to apply artificial intelligence to additive manufacturing by laser-powder bed fusion (L-PBF). At SOLEIL, synchrotron X-ray microtomography will be used to characterize the defects in L-PBF printed components. Software tools will be developed to analyse this tomography data in near real time, using conventional algorithms and artificial intelligence as appropriate to obtain the best results
Synchrotron SOLEIL seeks to hire a postdoc in materials science and/or computing for the AIQuAM3D project. The position is based on the ANATOMIX and PSICHE beamlines. It will start in January 2025 at the latest and will last 24 months.

• The ANATOMIX (Advanced Nanotomography and Imaging with Coherent X-rays) beamline provides X-ray tomography on the micro- and nanoscale, in absorption and phase contrast. It operates in the energy range between 5 and 50 keV and allows its users to obtain two- and three-dimensional radiographic images of bulk volume samples of macroscopic size (up to several cm thickness).
• The PSICHÉ (Pressure Structure and Imaging by Contrast at High Energy) beamline is dedicated to X-ray diffraction under extreme conditions (pressure-temperature) and to tomography at high energy, from ambient to extreme conditions.

For both beamlines, the scope of the scientific cases is very large: from biology and paleontology to materials science, high-pressure physics and geophysics.

I. Mission

The postdoc will work on the ANATOMIX and PSICHÉ beamlines under the joint supervision of Andrew King (PSICHE beamline scientist, imaging coordinator) and Timm Weitkamp (ANATOMIX beamline manager).

She/He will actively participate to the user-support program (X-ray computed tomography and materials science) and will be involved in the scientific, technical, and methodological activities of the beamlines. That means preparing the beamlines for the experiments, helping the users with the management of experimental setups, data acquisition and data treatment if necessary.

She/He will develop the AIQuAM3D research program (see next section). She/He will be granted in-house research beam time while also submitting proposals to the peer review committees. She/He will publish her/his results and present them at national and international conferences.  She/He may also pursue their own research interests and collaborations in addition to this program.

II. Responsibility and Tasks

The postdoc will work on two main topics:

•    Characterisation of defects in additively manufactured specimens
In Laser-based Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF), the additive manufacturing (AM) process with the highest industrial maturity and spread, there are more than 50 adjustable process parameters that influence part quality.  The support of μCT is needed because there is no other method to provide local part density information in a non-destructive, fast and economic manner. In this project an AI-model will be developed to correlate multiple features generated from L-PBF in-situ monitoring data with defect labels obtained by μCT. The ultimate goal is to implement an embedded model for real-time defect prediction in a L-PBF system and validate it for reference samples and a complex geometry demonstrator. The post-doc will contribute to these studies via μCT studies of AM parts.  

•    Development of software tools for real-time tomography reconstruction and data analysis
μCT is widely used as a tool to investigate three-dimensional morphology of materials in industrial research and development (R&D) and non-destructive testing. Synchrotron-based μCT is capable of very fast data acquisition at high spatial resolution, allowing in-situ imaging and high sample throughput. However, so far synchrotron μCT has remained mainly an R&D tool despite its advantages. One obstacle to its wider adoption is the delay between the design of an experiment and the final result. This is partly due to the quantity of data, which is often the bottleneck in the pipeline between data collection and result.  To ensure the efficient use of synchrotron beamtime for high-throughput analyses, real-time analysis or at least near-real-time automatic quality control of the acquired scan volumes would therefore be a tremendous advantage. In this project software tools (both conventional and using artificial intelligence) will be developed to automate and streamline both data analysis and data quality control/instrument feedback.

III. Education and Experience

The candidate should hold a PhD in mechanics of materials / physics applied to material science or equivalent and have experience in tomographic imaging. His/her skills must also include image and volume data processing with Python or some other language, as well as knowledge in AI modelling, training and inference.

The postdoc will join an enthusiastic and growing pluri-disciplinary team, benefiting from multiple national and international partnerships including the AIQuAM3D project.
We’re looking for someone curious, dynamic, autonomous, and who enjoys working in a team. 

IV. General conditions

This is a 2-year position.

The assistance to users imposes some on-call duty periods (typically 6 days per semester in average, including one weekend) and may require, in case of need, on-site interventions outside regular working hours.

Contacts:
Andrew KING (Imaging coordinator; beamline scientist PSICHÉ): andrew.king@synchrotron-soleil.fr
Timm WEITKAMP (Beamline manager and scientist  ANATOMIX): timm.weitkamp@synchrotron-soleil.fr