Approaches to X-ray CT Evaluation of In-Situ Experiments on Damage Evolution in an Interpenetrating Metal-Ceramic Composite with Residual Porosity

An interpenetrating metal-ceramic composite of AlSi10Mg and an open porous alumina foam, with residual porosity is investigated for the material damage under compressive load within an X-ray CT in-situ load stage. The focus of the research is on damage detection and evaluation with the commercial Avizo® software by ThermoFisher Scientific. Four different approaches are used to detect the material damage and compared afterward on their efficiency in detecting the material damage volume but not the porosity within the material. Image Stack Processing combined with different filtering techniques, as well as Digital Volume Correlation is used in this work to separate the material porosity and the material damage. For the here investigated material system with mainly spherical pores, a geometrical filter was very successful to separate porosity and damage. Nevertheless, the Digital Volume Correlation based approach showed many advantages in damage detection and turned out to be the approach of choice regarding damage onset.