A modified mean-linear-intercept method for distinguishing lamellar and globular eutectic carbides in metallographic samples

A new quantitative metallographic method to distinguish the morphology of lamellar from globular eutectic carbides in micrographs of steel was developed.The analytical image-processing method uses a standard interception method to evaluate the anisotropy of the analyzed surface features.On the basis of the degree of anisotropy the lamellar eutectic carbides the morphology in steel samples can be distinguished from the globular morphology.In comparison to similar existing methods, our method enables the user to uniquely specify the investigated image region.In this way it is especially useful for boundary cases, where both morphological types of carbides are present on the same micrograph and different parts of the image need to be analyzed separately.