Automated dihedral angle measurement in liquid phase sintered alloys

The dihedral angle distribution is a useful parameter in the quantification of liquid-phase sintered alloys. Recently, Chhabra et al. have successfully developed a methodology based on digital image processing for dihedral-angle measurements on single-phase polycrystalline alloys. In this paper, the technique used by Chhabra et al. has been modified to evaluate dihedral angles of microstructures in a two-dimensional plane section of two-phase liquid-phase sintered alloys. It is shown that the procedure is extremely fast and accurate and, therefore, can be applied to obtain a significantly large statistical sample of dihedral angles. The validity of this method is demonstrated by evaluating the dihedral angles on samples of W-Ni-Cu alloys.