Quantitative analysis of microstructure of carbon materials by HRTEM

The main object of the present research is to make a quantitative evaluation on the microstructure of carbon materials in terms of microcrystal. The digitized images acquired from finely pulverized carbon materials under HRTEM at a high magnification were processed by the image processing software so as to extract the fringes of (002) lattice of graphite crystal from the background image, and an FFT-IFFT filtering operation was performed followed by processes as binarization for the image and skeletonization for the fringes. A set of geometrical parameters including position, length and orientation was set up for every lattice fringe by calculating the binarized image. Then, the above obtained fringe parameters were put into an algorithm, which was especially developed for such fringe images so as to find fringes that could be regarded as those belonged to one single graphite microcrystal. The fringe was subjected sequentially to comparing procedures with every other fringe on aspects as parallelism, relative position and spacing, and the above comparisons were repeated till the last fringe. Eventually, the microcrystal size, its stacking number, and the distribution of the microcrystal in the whole sample, as well as other related structure information of such microcrystal in carbon materials were statistically calculated. Such microstructure information at nanometer level may contribute greatly to the interpretation of the properties of carbon materials and a better correlation with the same macrostructure.