Sargin Irmak, Beckman Scott P
School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, 99164, USA.
Sci Rep. 2019 Feb 7;9(1):1591. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-37794-y.
Many of the useful properties of modern engineering materials are determined by the material's microstructure. Controlling the microstructure requires an understanding of the complex dynamics underlying its evolution during processing. Investigating the thermal and mass transport phenomena responsible for a structure requires establishing a common language to quantitatively represent the microstructures being examined. Although such a common language exists for some of the simple structures, which has allowed these materials to be engineered, there has yet to be a method to represent complex systems, such as the ternary microstructures, which are important for many technologies. Here we show how stereological and data science methods can be combined to quantitatively represent ternary eutectic microstructures relative to a set of exemplars that span the stereological attribute space. Our method uniquely describes ternary eutectic microstructures, allowing images from different studies, with different compositions and processing histories, to be quantitatively compared. By overcoming this long-standing challenge, it becomes possible to begin to make progress toward a quantitatively predictive theory of ternary eutectic growth. We anticipate that the method of quantifying instances of an object relative to a set of exemplars spanning attribute-space will be broadly applied to classify materials structures, and may also find uses in other fields.
现代工程材料的许多有用特性是由材料的微观结构决定的。控制微观结构需要了解其在加工过程中演变背后的复杂动力学。研究导致某种结构的热传输和质量传输现象需要建立一种通用语言来定量表示所研究的微观结构。尽管对于一些简单结构存在这样一种通用语言，这使得这些材料得以被设计，但尚未有一种方法来表示复杂系统，比如三元微观结构，而这种结构对许多技术来说都很重要。在此，我们展示了如何将体视学和数据科学方法结合起来，相对于一组跨越体视学属性空间的范例，定量表示三元共晶微观结构。我们的方法独特地描述了三元共晶微观结构，使得来自不同研究、具有不同成分和加工历史的图像能够进行定量比较。通过克服这一长期存在的挑战，朝着三元共晶生长的定量预测理论取得进展成为可能。我们预计，相对于一组跨越属性空间的范例来量化对象实例的方法将被广泛应用于材料结构分类，并且可能在其他领域也有用途。
