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Once an initial arrangement of cement (and gypsum, fly ash, etc.) particles in water has been created, Menu Selection 7 may be used to distribute the four major cement clinker phases amongst the cement particles. To do this, the 3-D microstructure image is filtered using the correlation files measured on the actual 2-D SEM images of the cement of interest [1,2,6]. The filtering process and subsequent thresholding and "sintering" are conducted in such a way as to match the volume and surface area fractions previously determined for each of the four major cement clinker phases, and provided as input via the table shown in the form in Figure 9. For example, these 3-D phase volume and surface area fractions might be obtained from the 2-D area and perimeter fractions given in the corresponding About this cement page in the cement images database (Menu Selection 1). The user could simply print this page and type the appropriate values into the table for volume and surface area fractions.
To use Menu Selection 7, the user must specify a negative integer to be used as a random number seed and the names of the original and final (processed) microstructures, and select the correlation files (from a pulldown menu) to be used in filtering the original microstructure. In addition, they must fill in the table providing the volume and surface area fractions of each of the four major cement clinker phases and provide their e-mail address in order to receive a notification when the processing is complete. Ordinarily, on the order of 20 min of CPU time is required to distribute the various phases amongst the original cement particles. The VCCTL is set up to perform only one phase distribution at any specific time. Therefore, if the system is busy distributing phases for one microstructure when another request is submitted, the user will be notified to resubmit their job at a later time.
Figure 9: Form to specify inputs to be used in distributing phases amongst cement particles.