Statistical verification of 2D-to-3D conversion of size and number density of particles

Abstract

Particle/grain size and their number density arecommonly characterized in two dimensions (2D) from planaroptical or SEM micrographs of polished samples. Accurateconversion of such quantities into the three dimensional (3D)values are necessary for prediction of material properties.Several contradicting conversion correlations are available inliterature. The main objective of the current works it to verifysome of them. For this purpose, geometrical (3D) models ofrandomly distributed mono-size spheres were constructed andsliced at different planes. The particle count and their size werevariated within the same control volume. The statisticalinvestigations of the date suggested a (2D)-to-(3D) conversionfactor of 1.152377 ± 0.009427, which is very close to some ofearlier works [A. N. Sinha, 1999].

Keywords

• quantitative metallography
• image analysis
• grain size
• particle size