The new units will get their very own space in the Microscopy Suite, with remodeling set for an area west of the Suite's rooms in the Beckman basement that will eventually house the three new acquisitions, the Skyscan micro-CT, and offices.

"It's a great opportunity for us to do this, to be able to design the facility from the ground up, from the basement up, and do it right," Robinson said.

The technology can be used for imaging a wide range of samples, such as biological materials at their cellular level, or for imaging at the nanoscale, including industrial materials like semiconductors or natural ones like geological samples.

Robinson and Yin expect users from varied departments on campus to utilize the CT units, especially the nano-CT. Co-authors of the grant proposal included researchers from more than 20 departments on campus representing fields as diverse as animal sciences and mechanical engineering.

Once the entire array of CT units are installed and operating, researchers from many different fields can gain high resolution imaging results not possible with other techniques on samples such as bone tissue, nano-electromechanical systems (NEMS), pharmaceuticals, and many other materials.

Yin is already working with graduate student Wei Zhu of researcher Richard Masel's laboratory using the Xradia MicroXCT for a project involving fuel cells. The new microscope hasn't disappointed.

"It has performed better than we expected," Yin said. "Her project is developing fuel cells which are made of graphite. Graphite is conductive and opaque, which means we cannot characterize it with either an optical microscope or an electron microscope. Only an X-ray machine can look through that. They have water in graphite channels and the only way they can monitor the progress of water droplets is through X-ray. We have gotten some very satisfying results. The other micro-CT doesn't have the same signal quality."

The CT microscopes will be available 24 hours a day to University of Illinois faculty, staff and students, and their campus and industry collaborators. Microscopy Suite staff trains users to independently operate the units and assists them with sample preparation, acquisition, processing, analysis, and storage of the CT data. With each new project, the Microscopy Suite staff members also learn more about how to get the best results from the microscopes.

"The trick is going to be getting the contrasts that we need and learning how to deal with every particular sample because some samples are going to be really easy and some are going to be really difficult," Robinson said. "It's just like what we do with everything else: we are going to develop the techniques to be able to do this, learn what agents we can use to get contrast, what accelerating voltage we're going to use. It's really, really exciting."

Robinson added that a big component of having the increased imaging capacity offered by the new CT microscopes lies with the reconstruction software that is developed from the imaging results.

"What people are going to do is get these datasets, and then they want to take these datasets and get something that they can manipulate," he said. "And this is part of the deal, part of the idea of imaging, giving people 3-D images. We just add the icing to the cake."

It's a new level of service to researchers that Robinson said staff members are excited about.

"People are going to start bringing things in," he said. "We're finally going to have what people have been asking for upstairs."

With the leap forward in technology, however, comes a responsibility.

"This is a grant proposal that had the support of 47 faculty members," Robinson said. "We got everybody on board on this. It will be our job to make sure that everything works perfectly.