Quantification of damage parameters using X-ray tomography images

Damage in materials can be represented in many forms such as specific void or crack surfaces, the spacing between cracks, scalar representation of damage and general tensorial representation of damage. This paper presents methods to quantify the specific damaged surface area, the specific damaged surface area tensor, the damage tensor, the mean solid path among the damaged surfaces and the mean solid path tensor. The methods are general and use the reconstructed three-dimensional structure from tomography images and a virtual sectioning technique to obtain cross-sectional images needed for the quantification. The paper also presents the relation between the quantified damage parameters and their applications in mechanical modeling. This work is applied in particular to quantify the damage parameters of asphalt concrete specimens of the WesTrack project. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.