Polymer microstructure analysis
Measure what a micrograph shows — and be able to reproduce it.
MicroPolymerIF Software is a web platform for materials researchers. You upload SEM, optical or AFM images of a polymer’s microstructure; it runs the analyses you choose and returns numbers, charts and annotated images. Every result is stored with the exact image, the software version and the settings used, so a colleague — or a reviewer — can repeat it.
Built at the Instituto Federal de São Paulo (IFSP) for the polymer, microscopy and energy-materials research community.
What it measures
Three kinds of question, one workflow.
Each analysis is a self-contained module with documented settings and sensible defaults. You pick which ones run; new modules are added over time without changing how the rest work.
Structure & porosity
How much of the image is void, how large the pores are, how many distinct phases are present and how they are laid out.
- Void fraction, pore count, pore-size distribution (D10 / D50 / D90)
- Multi-phase map with per-phase area and interface density
- Characteristic feature size and orientation from the image’s frequency content
- Wiener and Hashin–Shtrikman bounds on effective conductivity
Surface & depth
A relative height map estimated from a single image by shape-from-shading, plus the roughness numbers used in surface metrology.
- Relative depth / height map with shaded relief
- ISO 25178 areal roughness: Sq, Sa, Sz, Sdr and more
- Autocorrelation length — how far the texture stays similar to itself
- Local feature (keypoint) density and how evenly it covers the field
Comparing several images
Group images of the same material and see which ones are structurally alike, and why.
- Similarity graph — one node per image, links between look-alikes
- Structural communities from combined frequency and surface descriptors
- The best-matching pair shown side by side with corresponding features drawn
- A record listing every image’s hash and descriptor vector
How it works
Four steps, one results page.
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Upload an image or a collection
One micrograph, or a folder /
.zipof them as a named collection, with the technique and the scale in micrometres per pixel. -
Choose which analyses to run
Tick the modules you want. The defaults are set for typical micrographs; every setting has a short in-app explanation of what to change and why.
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The analyses run in the background
Jobs wait in a queue and are processed one at a time by a separate, sandboxed service, with automatic retries if something is briefly unavailable.
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Read one results page per upload
Numbers, charts, schematics, similarity graphs and annotated images for every module you ran — and a record you can copy straight into a paper.
Why the results hold up
Every number carries its own paper trail.
Each result is saved together with the SHA-256 hash of the exact image bytes, the module name and version, the settings that were used versus the defaults that were left in place, and the versions of every scientific library involved. Re-running the same image through the same module version returns the stored result unchanged. This is what you cite, and what makes the work checkable.
Request access
Accounts are set up per research group. Send a short note about your samples and what you want to measure, and we’ll get you started.