On Pore Space Partitioning in Relation to Network Model Building for Fluid Flow Computation in Porous Media
Erwan Plougonven, Dominique Bernard, Nicolas Combaret · 2010
Porous materials are studied in a wide variety of fields, such as Earth sciences, petrophysics, paper industry, metallurgy, etc. In these applications, pore scale fluid flow is of prime interest, but direct computation of pressure and velocity fields are extremely time and memory-consuming. Network models (NM) constitute a widely accepted alternative: in NM, the complex structure of pore space is represented by an equivalent network of pore bodies (PB) connected via pore throats (PT). Starting from a 3D binary image of a porous sample, a skeleton of the pore space is built, using a distance-ordered homotopic thinning algorithm. In this chapter different crucial steps of this process are analyzed in depth. It describes a new method to filter the image before skeletonization to avoid spurious branches and other topological artefacts. The chapter presents the building of the graph, and describes PB delimitation. Controlled Vocabulary Terms flow; porous materials