A method for reverse engineering of material microstructure for heterogeneous CAD

Integration of material composition, microstructure, and mechanical properties with geometry information enables design and analysis of materials and products in a computer-aided design (CAD) environment. In this paper, we propose a method for the construction of material models from microstructure images, that can be integrated into a heterogeneous CAD representation. The method utilizes Radon and wavelet transforms to compute a surfacelet representation. A novel feature recognition method was developed to identify microstructure features, including embedded fibers and grain boundaries, from the surfacelet representation. The models and methods were demonstrated with examples of synthetic and engineered polymer nanocomposites, a metal alloy, and a medical dataset of human feet.

► Method to recognize material microstructure features from microstructure images.
► Application of image processing methods to the reverse engineering of materials.
► Enable integration of CAD models with a material’s process–structure–property relationships.
► Demonstrated method on linear fibers, linear and planar grain boundaries, and cylindrical features.