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Published June 2014 | public
Journal Article

X-ray micro-computed tomography and tortuosity calculations of percolating pore networks

Abstract

Synchrotron source X-ray micro-computed tomography was used for non-destructive three-dimensional (3-D) imaging of porous alumina structures, in which the porosity was induced by a granular porogen, added in amounts of 10–60 vol.%. Microstructural characteristics related to transport properties, including connectivity and tortuosity, were measured from the resulting 3-D data sets. Connectivity of 94.5–99.6% was measured for samples produced with 35–60% porogen (30.8–49.6% porosity). Two methods of calculating tortuosity, path length ratio and gas phase flux were compared, and the effect of sample volume on calculated tortuosity value and computational time was examined. Average sample tortuosity calculated using the two methods generally agreed, although significant directional anisotropy was detected in some cases for the gas phase flux calculation method. Tortuosity values as low as 1.5 were measured for alumina components with 49.6% porosity.

Additional Information

© 2014 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Received 6 December 2013; received in revised form 28 February 2014; accepted 2 March 2014. Available online 31 March 2014. The authors wish to acknowledge Sarah Miller for assistance in digital image transformations and measurements and Dr. Hsun-Yi Chen for his help with developing the code for the GPF method. This work was supported by the MRSEC program of the National Science Foundation (DMR-1121262) at the Materials Research Center of Northwestern University and National Science Foundation Grant DMR-0746424: "CAREER: Integrated Research and Education Program in Three-Dimensional Materials Science and Visualization". Portions of this work were performed in the EPIC facility of the NUANCE Center at Northwestern University, supported by NSF-NSEC, NSF-MRSEC, Keck Foundation, the State of Illinois, and Northwestern University. Use of the Advanced Photon Source, an Office of Science User Facility operated for the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory, was supported by the US DOE under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. The computational resources for the GPF calculations were provided by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by National Science Foundation Grant Number OCI-1053575, under Allocation No. TG-DMR110007, as well as the University of Michigan Advanced Research Computing.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 17, 2023