Three-dimensional reconstruction of microstructural volume from serial sections

Material microstructures are usually opaque. The study of three-dimensional material microstructures in materials science is often done by observing two-dimensional sections. This kind of observation is quite useful because most of the knowledge concerning microstructural evolution is based on such observation. However, much of other geometric information of a three-dimensional microstructure such as connectivity can not be gotten by observing two-dimensional sections. This paper presents a method to get geometric information such as connectivity of opaque materials illustrated via reconstruction of the three-dimensional microstructure of ceramic material. Serial sectioning and volume rendering were used to obtain information of microstructural geometry. The results of microstructural reconstruction clearly revealed that the grains are weakly connected in three-dimensional space. Therefore, visualization of three-dimensional microstructural volume is useful to understand connectivity of grains in microstructure.