The structure and constitution of opaque materials can be studied with X‐ray imaging methods such as 3D tomography. To observe the dynamic evolution of their structure and the distribution of constituents, for example, during processing, heating, mechanical loading, etc., 3D imaging has to be fast enough. In this paper, the recent developments of time‐resolved X‐ray tomography that have led to what one now calls “tomoscopy” are briefly reviewed A novel setup is presented and applied that pushes temporal resolution down to just 1 ms, that is, 1000 tomograms per second (tps) are acquired, while maintaining spatial resolutions of micrometers and running experiments for minutes without interruption. Applications recorded at different acquisition rates ranging from 50 to 1000 tps are presented. The authors observe and quantify the immiscible hypermonotectic reaction of AlBi10 (in wt%) alloy and dendrite evolution in AlGe10 (in wt%) casting alloy during fast solidification. The combustion process and the evolution of the constituents are analyzed in a burning sparkler. Finally, the authors follow the structure and density of two metal foams over a long period of time and derive details of bubble formation and bubble ageing including quantitative analyses of bubble parameters with millisecond temporal resolution.

A compact fully-protected micro-focus X-radiography facility (XRISE-M) is presented for the study of microstructure evolution during solidification of thin liquid alloy samples and chemical diffusion in liquid binary alloys in-situ and in real-time aboard a sounding rocket. XRISE-M presently enables the simultaneous processing of either two near-isothermal solidification furnaces or a combination of a linear-shear cell diffusion furnace and a near-isothermal solidification furnace. For optimal detector calibration shortly before flight the furnaces can be rotated around the central beam axis and calibration images can be recorded. The facility allows for a pre-heating of the samples into the liquid state prior to lift-off without leakage during the ascent phase at accelerations of up to 27 g. Macro-segregation on re-melting of thin metal samples for microstructure evolution investigations is prevented by an inclinable furnace metric. The use of ion-getter pumps for vacuum generation enables to exploit the entire available time of reduced gravity for image recording and data acquisition. With the device and currently available sample environments microstructure formation upon solidification and chemical diffusion under purely diffusive conditions in alloys can be investigated. The facility can be used equally for other investigations such as granular matter dynamics or metal foaming provided suitable experiment inserts are developed in the future.

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