Open Access

A critical amount of industrial energy input is lost as waste heat, and this amount peaks just above room temperature. The aim of this work is to develop a technology to convert this low-grade waste heat into electricity through a thermomagnetic generator based on Faraday's law of induction. To this end, water-flowable thermomagnetic elements are developed by the industrial partner to be used as heat exchanger components in the demonstrator. The 3D extrusion and post heat treatment process of the developed fine parts may introduce various defects that have an impact on their heat transfer efficiency, magnetic and mechanical properties. Here, the non-destructive characterisation technique of X-ray computed tomography (XCT) is used to evaluate the morphology of the developed components and to identify trends that contribute to the improvement of material performance in the demonstrator. In specific, XCT image analysis enables the 3D visualisation of the developed 3D-printed structures. Using DragonFly software, scalar quantities such as volume, total surface area and void fraction are estimated for each sample. More specifically, image segmentation using Otsu’s thresholding method, combined with morphological operations on the reconstructed 3D XCT volume, contributes to the estimation of the mean filament diameter, mean channel width and distribution of internal porosity along the printing direction. In addition, the repeatability and dimensional accuracy of the printing process are evaluated through slice analysis of each 3D-printed block, both along and perpendicular to the water-flow direction.