Prediction of the velocity distribution in porous media from the pore volume distribution*

The average pore velocity and the local velocity are important in porous media applications so that predicting the velocity distribution enables the prediction of unexpected issues that may occur media. In this study, velocity magnitude and pore size distributions were examined in twelve different porous media with porosity from 13% to 85%, including sandstones, carbonates, synthetic silica, sphere packings and fiber scaffolds. The flow field was simulated by lattice Boltzmann computations, [1,2], while pore networks were extracted by a maximal ball algorithm [3]. The velocity magnitude and pore volume were normalized by the mean velocity magnitude and mean pore volume, respectively. Two-sample Kolgomorov-Smirnov goodness-of-fit tests were performed, and the results showed that the velocity magnitude distribution and pore volume distributions in a porous medium are similar within statistical accuracy. This finding allows the prediction of the velocity distribution in porous media when the pore size distribution is known.

REFERENCES

[1]      R. Voronov et al. J. Biomech., 43(7). 1279–1286, 2010.

[2]      V. Nguyen et al. Fluids, 5(2) 79, 2020

[3]      A. Q. Raeini et al. Phys. Rev. E, 96(1) 013312, 2017.