Advances in the Characterisation of Ceramics PDF

ABSTRACT

Much of Ceramics Science rests on an investigation of the relationship between microstructure and properties. Although progress here will ultimately depend on methods for the quantitative characterisation of microstructure, the current generation of commercial software often fails in the fundamental identification of grains, grain boundaries and pores, particularly when the quality of the microstructural image is poor.

A new approach is proposed for addressing this problem, utilising the functionality of a modern workstation graphics library (e.g. Silicon Graphics GL). This permits a high degree of userinteraction, so that the operator can assist the computer in the quantification of microstructure. For example, this ability is crucial in dealing with sintered or fracture surfaces of ceramics.

Approaches to describing grain- and pore-size distributions are reviewed, with a comparison of lineal techniques and a methodology based on the representation of grains by equivalent ellipses. The latter technique also allows a quantification of preferred orientation (texture) in microstructures with columnar grains, and can be extended to take further microstructural features into account, e.g. second phases. Initial results on semi-automated identification of grain boundaries are also presented, making use of an image-smoothing technique.

Edited by: R. Freer