A Measurement Method for Two-dimensional Characterization Unit Based on Morphological Completion Analysis

Constructing three-dimensional (3D) structures from a two-dimensional (2D) reference images is the principal way of obtaining the 3D structure of a porous medium. The performance of a 3D reconstruction and time consumption are greatly depended on the size of 2D reference image. The morphological and statistical characteristics of a 3D reconstruction will be improved while the size of a 2D reference image is increasing. At the same time, the involved data will be dramatically increased, and the computer memory is also confronted with a great challenge. In this work, a measurement method for 2D characterization unit is proposed based on morphological completion analysis. The measurement method can quantify a minimum size 2D reference image that can effectively represent the morphological character of a 3D structure. The morphological and statistical characteristics of a 3D reconstruction can not only be effectively represented, but also the involved data and computer memory are minimized when a 2D characterization unit is used. The core material was selected to verify the validity of the proposed measurement method, and the autocorrelation function and linear-path function were adopted as quantitative means. Detailed experiments show that the proposed measurement method is effective and reliable.