Predicting micromechanical properties of cement paste from backscattered electron (BSE) images by computer vision

Predicting micromechanical properties of cement paste from backscattered electron (BSE) images by computer vision

Liang, M. (TU Delft Materials and Environment)
He, S. (TU Delft Materials and Environment)
Gan, Yidong (Huazhong University of Science and Technology)
Zhang, Hongzhi (Shandong University)
Chang, Z. (TU Delft Materials and Environment)
Schlangen, E. (TU Delft Materials and Environment)
Šavija, B. (TU Delft Materials and Environment)

2023

This paper employs computer vision techniques to predict the micromechanical properties (i.e., elastic modulus and hardness) of cement paste based on an input of Backscattered Electron (BSE) images. A dataset comprising 40,000 nanoindentation tests and 40,000 BSE micrographs was built by express nanoindentation test and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). A Residual Convolutional Neural Network (Res-Net) model, which differs from a typical Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture by a shortcut connection, was employed and compared with a simple table model. The models were trained, tuned, and tested over a training, validation and testing set comprising 70%, 15% and 15% of the 40,000 data pairs, respectively. The following conclusions were drawn: 1) Express nanoindentation tests can provide reliable information for cement paste. Deconvolution based on Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) can obtain almost invariant statistics for each phase; 2) Based on averaged greyscale values of each BSE image, a table model can predict the elastic modulus and hardness with R² of 0.80 and 0.83, respectively; 3) Based on the intensity of each pixel as well as their patterns in each BSE image, the Res-Net model can predict the elastic modulus and hardness with a R² of 0.85 and 0.88, respectively. Deconvolution of the Res-Net prediction obtains similar invariant statistics as derived by the nanoindentation tests, which gives strong evidence of the applicability of the Res-Net model.

BSE
Cement paste
Computer vision
Elastic modulus
Express nanoindentation test
Hardness
Res-Net

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:6d13af6c-d457-43eb-9c5c-7710d5dc9bd9

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matdes.2023.111905

0264-1275

Materials & Design, 229

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2023 M. Liang, S. He, Yidong Gan, Hongzhi Zhang, Z. Chang, E. Schlangen, B. Šavija