TEXTURAL FRACTOGRAPHY

The reconstitution of the history of a fatigue process is based on the knowledge of any correspondences between the morphology of the crack surface and the velocity of the crack growth (crack growth rate - CGR). The textural fractography is oriented to mezoscopic SEM magnifications (30 to 500x). Images contain complicated textures without distinct borders. The aim is to find any characteristics of this texture, which correlate with CGR. Pre-processing of images is necessary to obtain a homogeneous texture. Three methods of textural analysis have been developed and realized as computational programs: the method based on the spectral structure of the image, the method based on a Gibbs random field (GRF) model, and the method based on the idealization of light objects into a fibre process. In order to extract and analyze the fibre process, special methods - tracing fibres and a database-oriented analysis of a fibre process - have been developed.