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Pore Scale (pore + scale)

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Engineering100%

Selected Abstracts

Influence of moisture content on measurement accuracy of porous media thermal conductivity

HEAT TRANSFER - ASIAN RESEARCH (FORMERLY HEAT TRANSFER-JAPANESE RESEARCH), Issue 8 2009
Mingzhi Yu
Abstract The thermal conductivity measurement accuracy of sand was experimentally studied with a hot disk thermal constant analyzer and water morphologies, distribution, and evolution at the pore scale were observed with a charge coupled device (CCD) combined with a microscope. It was found that thermal conductivities of samples with low moisture content (<25%) could not be accurately measured. For samples with low moisture content, the analysis showed that the water in the region adjacent to the analyzer sensor mainly existed as isolated liquid bridges between/among sand particles and would evaporate and diffuse to relatively far regions because of being heated by the sensor during measurement. Water evaporation and diffusion caused the sample constitution in the region adjacent to the sensor to vary throughout the whole measurement process, and accordingly induced low accuracy of the obtained thermal conductivities. Due to high water connectivity in pores, the rate of water evaporation and diffusion in porous media of high moisture content was relatively slow when compared with that of low moisture content. Meanwhile, water in the relatively far regions flowed back to the region adjacent to the sensor by capillary force. Therefore, samples consisting of the region adjacent to the sensor maintained the constant and thermal conductivities of porous media with relatively high moisture content and could be measured with high accuracy. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Heat Trans Asian Res; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/htj.20272 [source]

Using a pore-scale model to quantify the effect of particle re-arrangement on pore structure and hydraulic properties

HYDROLOGICAL PROCESSES, Issue 8 2007
Oagile Dikinya
Abstract A pore-scale model based on measured particle size distributions has been used to quantify the changes in pore space geometry of packed soil columns resulting from a dilution in electrolyte concentration from 500 to 1 mmol l,1 NaCl during leaching. This was applied to examine the effects of particle release and re-deposition on pore structure and hydraulic properties. Two different soils, an agricultural soil and a mining residue, were investigated with respect to the change in hydraulic properties. The mining residue was much more affected by this process with the water saturated hydraulic conductivity decreasing to 0·4% of the initial value and the air-entry value changing from 20 to 50 cm. For agricultural soil, there was little detectable shift in the water retention curve but the saturated hydraulic conductivity decreased to 8·5% of the initial value. This was attributed to localized pore clogging (similar to a surface seal) affecting hydraulic conductivity, but not the microscopically measured pore-size distribution or water retention. We modelled the soil structure at the pore scale to explain the different responses of the two soils to the experimental conditions. The size of the pores was determined as a function of deposited clay particles. The modal pore size of the agricultural soil as indicated by the constant water retention curve was 45 µm and was not affected by the leaching process. In the case of the mining residue, the mode changed from 75 to 45 µm. This reduction of pore size corresponds to an increase of capillary forces that is related to the measured shift of the water retention curve. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

About Darcy's law in non-Galilean frame

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR NUMERICAL AND ANALYTICAL METHODS IN GEOMECHANICS, Issue 3 2004
C. Geindreau
Abstract This paper is aimed towards investigating the filtration law of an incompressible viscous Newtonian fluid through a rigid non-inertial porous medium (e.g. a porous medium placed in a centrifuge basket). The filtration law is obtained by upscaling the flow equations at the pore scale. The upscaling technique is the homogenization method of multiple scale expansions which rigorously gives the macroscopic behaviour and the effective properties without any prerequisite on the form of the macroscopic equations. The derived filtration law is similar to Darcy's law, but the tensor of permeability presents the following remarkable properties: it depends upon the angular velocity of the porous matrix, it verifies Hall,Onsager's relationship and it is a non-symmetric tensor. We thus deduce that, under rotation, an isotropic porous medium leads to a non-isotropic effective permeability. In this paper, we present the results of numerical simulations of the flow through rotating porous media. This allows us to highlight the deviations of the flow due to Coriolis effects at both the microscopic scale (i.e. the pore scale), and the macroscopic scale (i.e. the sample scale). The above results confirm that for an isotropic medium, phenomenological laws already proposed in the literature fails at reproducing three-dimensional Coriolis effects in all types of pores geometry. We show that Coriolis effects may lead to significant variations of the permeability measured during centrifuge tests when the inverse Ekman number Ek,1 is ,,(1). These variations are estimated to be less than 5% if Ek,1<0.2, which is the case of classical geotechnical centrifuge tests. We finally conclude by showing that available experimental data from tests carried out in centrifuges are not sufficient to determining the effective tensor of permeability of rotating porous media. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Viscous flow in three-dimensional reconstructed porous media

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR NUMERICAL AND ANALYTICAL METHODS IN GEOMECHANICS, Issue 8 2003
Marco Pilotti
Abstract In a recent paper Masad et al. (Int. J. Numer. Methods Eng. 2000; 26: 53,74) have shown the possibility of numerically studying fluid flow within two-dimensional microscopic images of granular materials. In this paper we investigate the possibility of computing the flow field at the pore scale within numerically reconstructed three dimensional porous media, by coupling a physically based sedimentation algorithm for porous media generation and a Lattice Boltzmann Technique for solving Navier equations for the monophasic flow of a newtonian fluid inside the intergranular space. Since the adopted sedimentation algorithm can produce porous media with a controlled level of complexity, we believe that this type of approach provides an ideal numerical laboratory to probe the effect of void space topology and geometry on the flow field. This should allow to understand the fluid-dynamic implications of processes such as compaction and cementation. After showing that the Lattice Boltzmann Technique is effective in solving Navier equations in porous media also at moderately high Reynolds, where Darcy's flow does not strictly hold anymore, we investigate the distribution of velocity components within porous media of growing complexity, starting from two different periodic arrangements of spheres up to a mixture of log-normally distributed spheres. We observe that the distribution of velocity components is conditioned by the medium complexity and tends to an exponential pattern. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]