Digital image-based analysis of morphology for porous materials

The porous material is one of the promising functional materials, and its macroscopic properties are strongly dependent on the microscopic morphology. To study the correlation between the microscopic heterogeneity and the macroscopic properties, a novel digital image-based analysis methodology is proposed in this paper, which consists of high resolution X-ray CT, digital image-based modeling, multi-scale stress analysis and geometrical morphology analysis. The proposed morphology analysis enables us to predict the microscopic stress concentration for spherical porous ceramics considering the heterogeneous dispersion of spherical pores and the macroscopic loading condition. The heterogeneity can be analyzed geometrically for very huge data with approximately 58 million voxel elements quickly. The morphology analysis is helpful for the multi-scale modeling and microscopic stress evaluation. The microscopic stress distribution is also discussed in association with the random heterogeneity for ceramics with open pores and with high porosity ratios.