Characterization of the fiber orientations in non-crimp glass fiber reinforced composites using structure tensor

Abstract

Abstract The mechanical properties of composite fiber materials are highly dependent on the orientation of the fibers. Micro-CT enables acquisition of high-resolution 3D images, where individual fibers are visible. However, manually extracting orientation information from the samples is impractical due to the size of the 3D images. In this paper, we use a Structure Tensor to extract orientation information from a large 3D image of non-crimp glass fiber fabric. We go through the process of segmenting the image and extracting the orientation distribution step-by-step using structure tensor and show the results of the analysis of the studied non-crimp fabric. The Jupyter notebooks and Python code used for the data-analysis are publicly available, detailing the process and allowing the reader to use the method on their own data. The results show that structure tensor analysis works well for determining fiber orientations, which has many useful applications.