Computing Particle Surface Areas and Contact Areas from Three‐Dimensional Tomography Data of Particulate Materials

Abstract

AbstractMicrotomography is an emerging technique for particle and particulate‐materials characterization. To use this technology effectively, robust and accurate computational algorithms are needed to compute relevant particle properties, including particle surface area and particle‐particle contact area. However, the most accurate algorithms that have been developed for computing the exposed (void/solid) surface area in a microtomography image cannot be used directly for computing surface areas or particle‐particle contact areas for individual particles in a dense packing. This paper presents an algorithm for extracting particle contact areas from a digitized, segmented image of a packed granular material, which in turn can be used to find individual particle surface areas (even if the complete surfaces are not exposed because of contacts in the packing). Results show that small errors in the binary surface‐area computations are magnified in the course of determining particle contact areas; the total error in the computation depends mainly on the size of the contact area in voxel units.