Quantifying damage in polycrystalline ice via X-Ray computed micro-tomography

The use of X-ray computed micro-tomography (micro-CT) is presented here as a useful tool for the analysis and quantification of damage in polycrystalline ice. Although known to be useful for characterizing damage in many other materials, the use of micro-CT has not yet been adapted to the non-trivial case of also characterizing damage in polycrystalline ice. Samples of polycrystalline ice were tested in uniaxial compression at six different strain rates, spanning four orders of magnitude, from 1 × 10−6 s−1 to 1 × 10−3 s−1, and two different testing temperatures of −10 °C and −20 °C. The extent of cracking from each test is characterized via micro-CT imaging and is quantified via a newly proposed variant of the crack density tensor, which accounts for any anisotropy in the mean crack orientation and is shown to be equivalent to the materials anisotropy tensor. To account for anisotropy in the distribution of cracks, an eigenanalysis is also performed. The results show that micro-CT can be a useful tool for both visualizing and quantifying damage in polycrystalline ice and that a 3-D analog of the traditional second-rank crack density tensor can be readily calculated via commercially available software.

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