3-D Fracture Network Tracing for X-Ray Computed Tomography Data APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:

ion means that every possible attribute is not represented by the object, thus 34 helping make necessary simplifications. Encapsulation means that the attributes that are present are hidden, and the user or programmer has to interact with or ask the object for information. The fourth characteristic of OOP is polymorphism. Polymorphism refers to the fact that different objects can respond to the same function call, but each object will implement its own version of that procedure; a print call to a B3D_Tracer will print out its length and midpoint, whereas a print call to a B3D_Tile will print out its location. A B3D_Tile is a collection of nine B3D_Tracers, which is an example of the characteristic that object also can be aggregated – meaning one object can consist of a multitude of other objects. A fracture network, for another example, is comprised of many smaller fracture sheets. Finally, objects are classified by hierarchies, a trait which is called object inheritance. Commonly referred to as the “is-a” relationship, inheritance means that some classes inherit the properties of overarching classes much like a sandstone “is-a” sedimentary rock, and thus has the properties that all sedimentary rocks share, but with unique encapsulated properties. In summary, the philosophy of the object-oriented programmer is that the world is made of hierarchical objects that can be abstracted, encapsulated, aggregated, and queried in similar ways (Clark 2013). The OOP philosophy guided the original construction of Blob3D as well as how the tracing algorithm described by this paper operates with the B3D_Tracer and B3D_Tile object