3D Reconstruction of Ultrafiltration Cakes from Binarised Images

Abstract

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) imaging is a common technique for studying microstructure of ultrafiltration cakes. It yields local microstructural information in the form of two-dimensional gray-level images of slices a few particle diameters in thickness. This work presents a simple yet powerful particle-by-particle reconstruction scheme for simulating ultrafiltration cake microstructure from TEM images. The scheme uses binarised TEM images, thereby permitting use of lesser quality TEM images. Moreover, the reconstruction scheme embeds the multi-scale nature of ultrafiltration cake microstructure using a novel concept that consists in matching the morphology of simulated and measured structures at a number of scales identifiable in the microstructure. In the end, reconstructed microstructures are intended for bettering our understanding of the relationships between cake morphology, ultrafiltration performance and operating conditions.