• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
• /
• v.36 no.5
• /
• pp.323-330
• /
• 2023

The development of an analysis model that reflects the microstructure characteristics of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) fiber-reinforced cementitious composites, which have a highly complex microstructure, enables synergy between efficient material design and real experiments. PVA fiber orientations are an important factor that influences the mechanical behavior of PVA fiber-reinforced cementitious composites. Owing to the difficulty in distinguishing the gray level value obtained from micro-CT images of PVA fibers from adjacent phases, fiber segmentation is time-consuming work. In this study, a micro-CT test with a voxel size of 0.65 ㎛³ was performed to investigate the three-dimensional distribution of fibers. To segment the fibers and generate training data, histogram, morphology, and gradient-based phase-segmentation methods were used. A U-net model was proposed to segment fibers from micro-CT images of PVA fiber-reinforced cementitious composites. Data augmentation was applied to increase the accuracy of the training, using a total of 1024 images as training data. The performance of the model was evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. The trained model achieved a high fiber segmentation performance and efficiency, and the approach can be applied to other specimens as well.