Heat Units - Video Lesson

An x-ray exposure creates a lot of heat, especially in the anode. There's other parts of the x-ray tube that get hot during exposures, but especially the And we can actually calculate the heat that is created in the air, and we call that heat units. Fortunately, there's a very simple calculation for understanding what heat units are. It's simply the KVP multiplied by the mass multiplied by what we call a modification factor. There's other terms for that, but they're always the same numbers. So here's our modification factors, and all of these modification factors are related to the type of equipment that we're using. So a one phase, actually a machine has a multiplication factor of one. So if you multiply the KVP times the mass, you multiply it by one, and obviously you get the same number of heat units but that's not true of other types of equipment. So if you're using a three phase six pulse machine, the modification factor is one point three five. So that's a lot more heat. Then we go into other types of machine, a three phase twelve pulse, The modification factor is one point four one, and a high frequency machine produces the most additional