Computer analysis of complex porous ceramic structures
The overall research idea of the research training group MIMENIMA is the tailoring of novel porous ceramic structures and their surfaces to applications in the fields of medicine, energy, environmental, chemical processing and space technology. Advanced data acquisition techniques such as X-ray microscopic tomography (XRM-T) are utilized to obtain accurate data about the complex three-dimensional structure of porous ceramic compounds. The quantitative analysis and visualization of such data sets is highly challenging due to both the complexity of the structures and the size of the data sets. The aim of this project is to develop highly automated computational analysis and visualization tools that will lead to a quantitative assessment of the properties of these ceramic materials. Examples of measures needed include pore size distributions and connectivity, aspect ratios and percolation coefficients. The developed tools shall be probed by using XRM-T data sets to analyze a variety of samples provided by the Advanced Ceramics Group and further projects of the MIMENIMA research group (P04/03, P07/03, P08/03, P10/03).
Fig. 1 (left): Porous ceramic body, visualized by X-ray microscopic tomography, Fig. 2 (right): Calculated pore size distribution, arbitrary units.
Contact: Rezwan (in cooperation with Ron Kikinis)