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Practical methods for measuring the tortuosity of porous materials from binary or gray‐tone tomographic reconstructions
Author(s) -
Gommes Cedric J.,
Bons AntonJan,
Blacher Silvia,
Dunsmuir John H.,
Tsou Andy H.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
aiche journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.958
H-Index - 167
eISSN - 1547-5905
pISSN - 0001-1541
DOI - 10.1002/aic.11812
Subject(s) - tortuosity , tomography , porosity , geodesic , tomographic reconstruction , measure (data warehouse) , binary number , porous medium , materials science , statistical physics , mathematics , mathematical analysis , physics , computer science , optics , composite material , arithmetic , database
Abstract Two practical methods are proposed to measure the tortuosity of a porous or permeable material from its tomographic reconstruction. The first method is based on the direct measurement of the shortest distance between two points in the pores, and the second is based on the geodesic reconstruction of the pore or permeation space. Unlike the first method, the second can be directly applied to gray‐tone tomograms, without the need of a segmentation step. The methods are illustrated with an electron tomogram of clay/plastic nanocomposite, an X‐ray microtomogram of sandstone, and a series of model morphologies consisting of penetrable random spheres. For the latter series, the measured tortuosities compare very well with those derived independently from the theoretical effective diffusion coefficients. © 2009 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 2009