Effects of microstructure morphology on stress in mechanoluminescent particles: Micro CT image-based 3D finite element analyses

In this paper, a novel investigation on the effect of microstructure morphology on the stress within mechanoluminescent (ML) particles is presented. It is known that the light intensity of ML materials is proportional to deviatoric stresses in the particles. A set of digital image processing techniques is introduced to compute quantitative morphological features of irregular shaped particles with high weight fraction from micro computed tomography (CT) images. The resulting 3D finite element (FE) model for a representative volume element (RVE) holds realistic shapes of ML particles providing volume-averaged von Mises stress (VAS). A total 13 morphological variables are classified into three groups, size, shape and distribution-dependent groups and statistically correlated with VAS from 3D FE analyses. As results, statistically independent and microstructure-sensitive variables for ML composites are identified. The morphological variables can be utilized for reconstruction of statistically equivalent volume elements and applied for microstructure-sensitive design of ML composites.