Computational Reconstruction and Quantification of Aerospace Materials

Microstructure reconstruction is a necessary tool for use in multi-scale modeling, as it allows for the analysis of the microstructure of a material without the cost of measuring all of the required data for the analysis. For microstructure reconstruction to be effective, the synthetic microstructure needs to predict what a small sample of measured data would look like on a larger domain. The Markov Random Field (MRF) algorithm is a method of generating statistically similar microstructures for this process. In this work, two key factors of the MRF algorithm are analyzed. The first factor explored is how the base features of the microstructure related to orientation and grain/phase topology information influence the selection of the MRF parameters to perform the reconstruction. The second focus is on the analysis of the numerical uncertainty (epistemic uncertainty) that arises from the use of the MRF algorithm. This is done by first removing the material uncertainty (aleatoric uncertainty), which is the noise that is inherent in the original image representing the experimental data. The epistemic uncertainty that arises from the MRF algorithm is analyzed through the study of the percentage of isolated pixels and the difference in average grain sizes between the initial image and the reconstructed image. This research mainly focuses on two different microstructures, B4C-TiB2 and Ti-7Al, which are a ceramic composite and a metallic alloy, respectively. Both of them are candidate materials for many aerospace systems owing to their desirable mechanical performance under large thermo-mechanical stresses.