• Freysoldt, Christoph
• Katnagallu, Shyam
• Neugebauer, Jörg
• Gault, Baptiste
• Gutfleisch, Oliver
• Polin, Nikita
• Navyanth, Kusampudi
• Molina-Luna, Leopoldo
• Berkels, Benjamin

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Atom probe tomography (APT) is ideally suited to characterize and understand the interplay of segregation and microstructure in modern multi-component materials. Yet, the quantitative analysis typically relies on human expertise to define regions of interest. We introduce a computationally efficient, multi-stage machine learning strategy to identify compositionally distinct domains in a semi-automated way, and subsequently quantify their geometric and compositional characteristics. In our algorithmic pipeline, we first coarse-grain the APT data into voxels, collect the composition statistics, and decompose it via clustering in composition space. The composition classification then enables the real-space segmentation via a density-based clustering algorithm, thus revealing the microstructure at voxel resolution. Our approach is demonstrated for a Sm–(Co,Fe)–Zr–Cu alloy. The alloy exhibits two precipitate phases with a plate-like, but intertwined morphology. The primary segmentation is further refined to disentangle these geometrically complex precipitates into individual plate-like parts by an unsupervised approach based on principle component analysis, or a U-Net-based semantic segmentation trained on the former. Following the composition and geometric analysis, detailed composition distribution and segregation effects relative to the predominant plate-like geometry can be readily mapped from the point cloud, without resorting to the voxel compositions.</jats:p>

Topics

• density
• impedance spectroscopy
• morphology
• grain
• phase
• precipitate
• clustering
• quantitative determination method
• atom probe tomography
• machine learning