Periodic Feature Characterization in Nanostructured Surfaces and Emulsions

Understanding structure-function relationships is essential to advance the manufacturing of next-generation materials with desired properties and functionalities. Precise and rapid measurement of features like wrinkle size, droplet diameter, and surface roughness is essential to establishing such structure-function relationships. To this end, this work developed feature size and surface morphology characterizations through image analysis in Python and validated them with both synthetic and experimental images. Manual measurements of biobased surfaces resulted in errors between 3.3% (N = 50; visually simple) and 51.2% (N = 100; visually complex) compared to the results of Python analysis. This analysis was also used to accurately distinguish multiple feature size populations in a given image (which were missed entirely in manual measurements) and to determine the skewness and kurtosis of biological surfaces in a surface roughness map. This work contributes to the larger goal of developing a robust and computationally cheap platform to analyze complex materials to accelerate structure-function discovery.