X-ray tomographic datasets associated with the article "Pore space of in-situ semi-dense asphalt: A characterization by X-ray tomography" (DOI: 10.1016/j.conbuildmat.2024.139091)

This Zenodo repository provides two sets of 3D images, which constitute part of the dataset base for the article titled "Pore space of in-situ semi-dense asphalt: A characterization by X-ray tomography", written by the same authors cited here, together with other co-authors. The article is published in the journal "Construction and Building Materials". It can be reached via the following URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conbuildmat.2024.139091.

The core specimens were obtained in 2019 from semi-dense asphalt (SDA) pavement sections located in the Swiss Canton of Zürich. For each of three pavement sections, labelled in the following as SDA4-1yr, SD4-5yr and SDA8, 100 mm diameter cores were extracted, both inside (I) and outside (O) of the wheel path, in order to see the effect of the traffic load on the pore space characteristics. Out of the original cores for the SDA4 pavements, 5 30 mm diameter sub-cores were drilled out of their centers, both in- and out-of the wheel path, and investigated with X-ray tomography. Only 1 30 mm core was analyzed for SDA8, both in- and out- of the wheel path. The asphalt in that pavement type has lower porosity, making it less interesting from the sound absorption viewpoint.

The whole dataset consists of .7z archive files. Such files have the following designations: SDA_J_K_L_Tomogram.7z or SDA_J_K_L_PoreSpaceBinTomogram.7z, where J = 1,2, K = I,O and L = 1,2,3,4,5. When referring to the specimen naming within the corresponding article, the first index, J, refers to the specimen "age": J = 1 indicates the 1-year old specimens (called SDA4-1yr within the article); J = 2 refers to the 5-year old ones (SDA4-5yr). The second index, K, refers to the location of the specimen within the pavement section course ("I" for in-wheel path and "O" for out-of-wheel path). The final index L just enumerates the distinct specimens of the same group.

There are two additional groups of archive files: LNA_I_Tomogram.7z/LNA_I_PoreSpaceBinTomogram.7z refers to the single in-wheel-path, 7-year old specimen (called SDA8 within the article); LNA_O_Tomogram.7z/LNA_O_PoreSpaceBinTomogram.7z refers to the single out-of-wheel path, 7-year old specimen.

The two sets/types of 3D images can be recognized by the different file naming.

The first set includes the raw X-ray tomograms of the 22 specimens analyzed. Each tomogram is stored in the form of a "stack" (or series) of 16-bit unsigned integer 2D TIFF image file, being one 2D cross-section (also called "slice", in tomographic jargon) from the "tomographed" volume. Such slices are contained in a folder. The folder was then archived in a .7z archive file.

The second set of 3D images is characterized by the filename pattern SDA_J_K_L_PoreSpaceBinTomogram.7z. Each zipped folder contains the slices of the binary tomogram of the whole pore space of the respective specimen, segmented according with the 3d image analysis workflow described within the article. Each slice of such tomogram was stored as a 8-bit unsigned integer 2D TIFF image file, whose pixels can have only two possible values: 255, if the pixel is inside the segmented pore space; 0 if the pixel is outside it.

Almost all of the acquired tomograms have an isotropic voxel size of 0.0214 mm, meaning that each slice is separated in space from the next one by such distance. The samples SDA_2_O_1 and SDA_2_I_1 have a voxel size of 0.0220 mm, while the sample LNA_I has a voxel size of 0.0223 mm.