Advanced fiber morphology determination in short fiber reinforced plastics using tracer fibers

While the use of contrast agents in in-vitro radiology is a standard practice in medical diagnostics, their use in industrial testing is practically non-existent. In the past, it has been shown that the use of tracer fibers as high-contrast fibers in the field of shortfiber-reinforced plastics offers clear advantages in determining the fiber orientation [1, 2]. For example, the analyzable component volume can be increased by a factor of five by using a single scan to determine fiber orientation [3]. In this study, the focus is on the analysis of the fiber length. It can be demonstrated that the use of tracer fibers offers a clear advantage in determining the fiber length distribution. Tracer fibers yield better results than an evaluation of normal reinforcement fibers, whereby a lower image quality of the CT scan is sufficient for the analysis of the tracer fibers. In addition the use of tracer fibers significantly reduces the time for the fiber length characterization.