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Pore structures: Measurement, characterization and relevance for flow and transport in soils
Author(s) -
Lehmann Peter
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
pamm
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1617-7061
DOI - 10.1002/pamm.200510011
Subject(s) - porous medium , sphere packing , characterization (materials science) , soil water , flow (mathematics) , geometry , characterisation of pore space in soil , porosity , materials science , chord (peer to peer) , mechanics , mathematics , geology , physics , soil science , nanotechnology , composite material , computer science , distributed computing
The geometry of the pore space determines the flow and transport properties of a soil under water saturated and unsaturated conditions. The spatial arrangement of the pores can be mapped using the appropriate tomographic technique. To understand the effect of the pore space on flow and transport, the complex pore structures must be quantified. To reveal the importance of various geometrical properties, porous media with well defined geometrical properties were numerically generated and were compared with a sand medium containing sphere‐like particles with sizes ranging from 80 to 1.250 µm. The spatial distribution of water and air was calculated for the optimized media and the sand packing to quantify the relevance of the geometric properties. In a first test, the sand packing was compared with a generated medium with identical Minkowski functionals. The resulting pores of the generated media were too large and the water retention was underestimated. In a second test, a medium with an optimized chord length distribution was generated and a good agreement with respect to water distribution was found. The chord length distribution is a more relevant property, because it takes into account the correlation of the system over large spatial distances. (© 2005 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)