A method to quantify the 3D microstructure of fibrous materials containing mineral fillers using X-ray microtomography: application to paper materials

This article proposed and validated an original and automatic method based on synchrotron X-ray microtomography to characterise non-destructively, in 3D, the mineral fillers that may be present in fibrous composite materials. The approach consists of (i) obtaining the 3D internal structure of the sample in a non invasive way, (ii) identifying the fillers in the 3D microstructure using appropriate image processing tools, (iii) calculating the filler content on the numerical data, and (iv) validating the representativity of the data sets by evaluating the representative elementary volume. This method was successfully applied in the case of paper samples. The numerical filler content were in good agreement with standards. This method opens new perspectives in terms of characterisation of filler spatial repartition.