Sodium acetate trihydrate (SAT) can be used as phase change material in latent heat storage with or without utilizing supercooling. The change of density between liquid to solid state leads to formation of cavities inside the bulk SAT during solidification. Samples of SAT which had solidified from supercooled state at ambient temperature and samples which had solidified with a minimal degree supercooled were investigated. The temperature dependent densities of liquid and the two types of solid SAT were measured with a density meter and a thermomechanical analyzer. The cavities formed inside samples of solid SAT, which had solidified after a high or minimal degree of supercooling, were investigated by X-ray scanning and computer tomography. The apparent density of solid SAT depended on whether it solidified from a supercooled state or not. A sample which solidified from a supercooled liquid contained 15% cavities and had a density of 1.26 g/cm 3 at 25 °C. SAT which had solidified with minimal supercooling contained 9% cavities and had a density of 1.34 g/cm 3 at 25 °C. The apparent densities of the solid SAT samples were significant lower than the value of solid SAT reported in literature of 1.45 g/cm 3. The density of liquid and supercooled SAT with extra water was also determined at different temperatures.
Performing dilation and erosion using large structuring elements can be computationally slow-a problem especially pronounced when processing volumetric data. To reduce the computational complexity of dilation/erosion using spherical structuring elements, we propose a method for approximating a sphere with a zonohedron. Since zonohedra can be created via successive dilations/erosions of line segments, this allows morphological operations to be performed in constant time per voxel. As the complexity of commonly used methods typically scales with the size of the structuring element, our method significantly improves the run time. We use the proposed approximation to detect large spherical objects in volumetric data. Results are compared with other image analysis frameworks demonstrating constant run time and significant performance gains.
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