Multifractal description of fracture morphology: investigation of the fractures of sintered carbides

In this paper, a new definition of probability is proposed, which should be applied in the case of a multifractal analysis of a fracture profile. This allows making the span of a multifractal spectrum dependent on the degree of the profile line development as well as on local changes of the distances between its points in places where overlaps and secondary cracks occur. The verification was performed for 28 specimens of seven sintered carbide grades, the fracture profiles of which overlaps had been removed. The new method enables one to apply a multifractal analysis for an evaluation of the fracture morphology by means of surface stereometry, reducing in this way the time consumption of the research methodology, and it also makes more objective owing to an analysis of a very large number of profiles.