To generate more X-ray quants the focal spot is positioned in a large angle towards the filament; the effective focal spot (seen if
) is much smaller as the thermal focal spot where the electrons are absorbed.
A small target angle (seen perpendicular onto the focal spot) allows a larger area for the same size of effective focal spot but the effect is more relevant.
The focal spot size depends on the angle in the beam - in both directions.
The nominal focal spot size is only valid for 0° / 0° (in the center of the beam). An uniform focal spot size not possible in the full beam, in the result the geometrical unsharpness due to focal spot depends on position of object in the beam!
To show the effective focal spot shape in the full beam a 1mm thick Tungsten plate was created with 25 holes
and the central nine holes were imaged with a magnification of eight with the large focal spot of a 225kV tube with a target angle of 11°. The central hole shows a focal spot size of about 400µm (
*200µm) in all four directions (measured with the
):
but in the "corners" the focal spot shape look different
and with the evaluation results of the corner focal spots
the different sizes in the beam is showed: The size in direction of the electron beam increases from 262µm (
*131µm) at the right side to 592µm (
*296µm) on the left side.
* due to a mistake in scaling a factor of two has to be applied to the printed values.