Material feature representation and identification with composite surfacelets

Computer-aided materials design requires new modeling approaches to characterize and represent fine-grained geometric structures and material compositions at multiple scales. Recently, a dual-Rep approach was developed to model materials microstructures based on a new basis function, called surfacelet. As a combination of implicit surface and wavelets, surfacelets can efficiently identify and represent planar, cylindrical, and ellipsoidal geometries in material microstructures and describe the distribution of compositions and properties. In this paper, these primitive surfacelets are extended and composite surfacelets are proposed to model more complex geometries. Composite surfacelets are constructed by Boolean operations on the primitives. The surfacelet transform is applied to match geometric features in three-dimensional images. The composition of the material near the identified features can then be modeled. A cubic surfacelet and a v-joint surfacelet are developed to demonstrate the reverse engineering process of retrieving material compositions from material images. & 2016 Society of CAD/CAM Engineers. Publishing Servies by Elsevier. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).