Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 February 2011
The relationship between microscopical damaging of concrete and its mechanical parameters such as Young's modulus and degree of reversibility is a basic issue. In the same time, transport properties and of course the durability of civil engineering and hydraulic structures are linked to the state of microcracking.
The replica technique has been developed in our laboratory in order to study microcracks with a scanning electron microscope. This non-destructive method allows observation of the imprint of the concrete surface and to follow the evolution of the alterations with time. An objective quantitative analysis requires numerous replicas and many microscopic fields within each replica.
After a brief state of the art of the automatic method of extraction of lines by image processing, we propose a specific algorithm of image analysis which allows the cleaning of the pictures and the extraction of the microcrack skeleton. Today, this procedure has been validated on cement paste samples. It has to be improved to be applied on concrete.
The measured parameters are the microcrack specific lengths and their orientation. The objective values measured by means of this procedure compare favorably to results obtained by hand drawing.