Stochastic modelling of 3D fiber structures imaged with X-ray microtomography
Philip Townsend, Emanuel Larsson, Tomas Karlson, Stephen A. Hall, Malin Lundman, Per Bergström, Charlotta Hanson, Niklas Lorén, Tobias Gebäck, Aila Särkkä, Magnus Röding
Abstract
Many products incorporate into their design fibrous material with particular levels of permeability as a way to control the retention and flow of liquid. The production and experimental testing of these materials can be expensive and time consuming, particularly if it needs to be optimised to a desired level of absorbency. We consider a parametric virtual fiber model as a replacement for the real material to facilitate studying the relationship between structure and properties in a cheaper and more convenient manner. 3D image data sets of a sample fibrous material are obtained using X-ray microtomography and the individual fibers isolated. The segmented fibers are used to estimate the parameters of a 3D stochastic model for generating softcore virtual fiber structures. We use several spatial measures to show the consistency between the real and virtual structures, and demonstrate with lattice Boltzmann simulations that our virtual structure has good agreement with respect to the permeability of the physical material.