Statistical verification of 2D-to-3D conversion of size and number density of particles

Particle/grain size and their number density are commonly characterized in two dimensions (2D) from planar optical or SEM micrographs of polished samples. Accurate conversion of such quantities into the three dimensional (3D) values are necessary for prediction of material properties. Several contradicting conversion correlations are available in literature. The main objective of the current works it to verify some of them. For this purpose, geometrical (3D) models of randomly distributed mono-size spheres were constructed and sliced at different planes. The particle count and their size were variated within the same control volume. The statistical investigations of the date suggested a (2D)-to-(3D) conversion factor of 1.152377 ± 0.009427, which is very close to some of earlier works [A. N. Sinha, 1999].