Micro-tomographic Techniques Applied to Particulate Solids Based Products Characterisation

The characterization of particulate solids based products resulting from the mixing of different particulate solids, characterized by different size class distribution, different morphology and different chemical-physical attributes is always difficult. Such a difficulty, both for coherent and incoherent products manufacturing, is mainly related to establish a correlation between originating particles attributes and final detectable product characteristics. Resulting products are usually characterized looking at their response in respect of one or more specific properties and not looking also at their 3D internal structure in terms of relative assessment of the utilized particulate solids. In this paper the possibility offered by small-scale X-Ray tomography to evaluate the internal structure of different particulate solids based materials was investigated. The developed set of procedures, being able to realize a 3D topological mapping of the constituting particulate solids materials, can be also profitably applied for the characterization of many other different products where the spatial identification of the different constituting elements, both in terms of dimension and position, represents the primary goal to develop and set-up innovative quality control actions.