Computationally efficient approach to quantify 2D particle morphological descriptors

Department of Civil Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India

^* e-mail: ce19s020@smail.iitm.ac.in
^** e-mail: rameshkk@iitm.ac.in

Published online: 7 June 2021

Abstract

The macro-scale behavior of granular materials is strongly influenced by grain kinematics. The mobility of the grains in turn is affected by grain morphology which needs to be comprehensively characterized. Initially, morphological descriptors were determined by manual processes which were tedious and cumbersome. But with the help of image processing techniques and computational geometry, this problem can be handled with ease. The long-established descriptors such as sphericity and roundness can be estimated by operating over the grain boundary obtained from 2D images of the particle. The main objective of this study is to quantify these descriptors in a computationally effective way. The roundness quantification in previous studies involves the sequence of processes such as removing the noise, corner identification and fitting circles. This paper details the necessary modifications to the quantification process required to reduce the cost of time for a single particle. Further, the influence of different smoothing techniques and a new corner identification method will be detailed.