Preparation, Characterization, Image Segmentation and Particle Size Analysis of Cow Bone Powder for Composite Applications

Cow bone is a bio-waste material that has caused environmental unfriendliness to the people living around the place of production and deposition. In recent time, researchers have exploited various means of utilizing this bio-waste material and make it environmentally friendly and economically utilizable, especially in the area of applications, such as activated carbon, water purification, reinforcement in composites, filler and additives, and its efficacy has been traced to whether is in the form of macro-, micro- and nanoparticles. In this study, cow bone head (skull) was collected, washed and cleaned from meats, processed, sun-dried for six weeks, and it was then washed again with distilled water to remove impurities and contaminants, then placed inside the oven set at 50 °C to dry for 5 h to remove any trace of moisture content and to ensure absolute dryness. It was then milled into nanoparticle powder using vibratory disk milling machine and the milling times were 0 min which was taken to be 150 µm size, 20, 40 and 60 min. The morphological and physiological characterizations were carried out using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) as well as X-ray fluorescence (XRF). MATLAB (R2015a) was employed for image processing into bimodal with foreground and background pixels using thresholding segmentation method. SEM images were taken at 1.00 ×, 2.00 × and 5.00 × which resulted to 50 µm, 20 µm and 10 µm, respectively. The image segmentation was employed to determine the foreground from a background of cow bone powder (CBP) and to enhance high resolutions, visual perception as well as to achieve better quality of the final output.