APS March Meeting 2023
Volume 68, Number 3
Las Vegas, Nevada (March 5-10)
Virtual (March 20-22); Time Zone: Pacific Time
Session A18: Fluids I
8:00 AM–11:00 AM,
Monday, March 6, 2023
Room: Room 210
Sponsoring
Unit:
DFD
Chair: Ildoo Kim, KonKuk Univ
Abstract: A18.00003 : Blocking out Voids in Percolating Media with Impentrable Cores*
8:24 AM–8:36 AM
Abstract
Presenter:
Donald J Priour
(Youngstown State University)
Author:
Donald J Priour
(Youngstown State University)
We examine structurally disordered comprised of interpenetrating polyhedral impenetrable grains with randomly selected shapes and sizes. With fluid and/or charge transport confined to voids among impentrable grains, connected interstitial volumes form system spanning networks below a crtical grain concentration per unit volume. The latter marks the phase boundary between among systems which percolate on macroscopic scales (for lower grain concentrations) and those which do not (for higher grain concentrations). With large-scale Monte Carlo simulations based on dynamical infiltration of void volume networks with virtual tracer particles, we calculate critical indices, including the percolation transition. Subdividing the system into voxels (small cube shaped volumes) fulfills a pragmatic role in minimizing computational effort and memory usage, allowing for the examination of systems with as many as a billion voxels volumes, each of which is occupied by or is contact with on the order of a dozen impenetrable grains. In addition, we exploit the voxel volumes as a more efficient way to find the percolation transition than the root mean square distance traversed by virtual tracers due to higher scaling exponents with tracer dwell time for the mean number of voxel volumes visited over the course of a dynamical infiltration trajectory. In studying porous media comprised of highly irregular angular grains, we consider systems made of up polyhedra cleaved many times with randomly oriented slicing planes where the mean number of fragmentation events is a tunable parameter. We find that the critical porosity increases monotonically and ultimately saturates at about 5.5% with increasing average number of slices per grain. This saturation of the critical porosity occurs in spite of the fact that the range of grain volumes ultimately expands to span several orders of magnitude even as the shape distribution tends to a limiting profile and ceases to evolve.
*Funded in part by a YSU URC internal grant