Stereological analysis of creep cavities on polished sections

An analysis is presented of the stereological problem of estimating the distribution of sizes and shapes of creep cavities from cavity measurements taken on polished plane sections, subject to the assumptions that the cavities may be represented as collections of oblate spheroids and that the distribution of orientations of the cavities is known a priori. The problem is cast in the form of a double integral equation whose solution yields the desired distribution. An iterative numerical solution technique for this equation is proposed which seems to yield marked improvements over standard solution methods.