In recent years micro-tomography using synchrotron radiation (SR) or neutrons has became a well accepted tool for the non-invasive three-dimensional characterization of specimens in the fields of materials science, medicine, biology, and environmental research. Phase contrast and absorption contrast techniques have been developed to investigate millimetre and centimetre sized samples. Due to the steadily increasing requests for the routine application of these methods to series of samples, maximal use of the limited beamtime is required. We can estimate the data rates using the example of high throughput SRμCT. Here, the minimum data rate is 2k x 2k, 16 bit, 1 Hz, leading to 64 MB/s, with upgrade to 4k x 4k, 10 Hz possible, leading to >2 GB/s. One must note, however, the following operational demands:

• Continuous operation for 24 h: This includes automatic sample changing, which itself requires sample pre-investigation
• The total amount of data can be estimated as follows:
• 12 GB / scan (raw data)
• 32 GB / scan (tomograms)
• High resolution: 15 min / scan
• Medium resolution: 1 min / scan
• Low resolution: 1 second /scan
• This leads in one day to 1 TB per day raw data in high resolution!
• One must take care of the bottlenecks of online reconstruction during the scan and of high-quality offline reconstruction.

This will become the basis for optimizing the use of the available SR beam time and will increase the throughput of the systems maintaining the dynamic range and contrast in the tomograms. The aim of HDRI is to reduce the time needed for the first possible evaluation of the reconstructed sample from presently more than one hour to about one minute.