Three-dimensional reconstruction and morphologic characteristics of porous metal fiber sintered sheet

• Micro-CT technology was used to achieve the 3D geometrical reconstruction.
• Skeleton extraction algorithm was modified to get the medial skeleton.
• Skeleton filter operation was adopted to deal with the segmented skeleton.
• Useful morphological statistics was obtained through skeleton segments.
• Relationship between structure and manufacturing processes was discussed.

This paper presents an approach to achieve morphological characterizing for complex porous materials based on micro X-ray tomography images, with an example of a novel porous metal fiber sheet produced through solid-state sintering method. The geometrical reconstruction was performed after selection of volume of interest and image processing of anisotropic diffusion smooth. The reconstructed gray level images were then transferred into binary images by adjusting binarization threshold according to the actual porosity. Taking into account the tubular structural feature of the fibers, skeleton extraction algorithm based on the distance transform function was applied and further improved by the scale axis transform method. The skeleton was later pruned and segmented according to the contact points to perform morphological characterizing. Compared with actual manufacturing parameters, the style, length, radius, orientation and tortuosity of fiber segments were discussed. The results show that our proposed method can well describe the actual geometrical and morphological characteristics, which will provide a promising method for the structural description of fibrous networks.