A Permeability–Throat Diameter Correlation for a Medium Generated with Delaunay Tessellation and Voronoi Algorithm

Abstract

Describing different transport phenomena through porous media at micro- and mesoscale represents a convenient pre-step in experimental characterization for materials. A detailed study of transport properties in porous materials is required to find suitable microstructural configurations which allow a better performance into mechanic/hydraulic system. Porous media are widely used in several fields of application such as in fuel cells (different layers inside the device) and geological sciences (soil properties). The purpose of the present work is to propose a permeability correlation for digitally created three-dimensional (3D) pore media considering the diameter of the throats connecting the pores within the domain. The 3D samples are generated by means of the Delaunay tessellation and Voronoi algorithm for pore position and throat characteristics, respectively. The model implementation is carried out by using OpenPNM, an open-source pore network modeling package, which has proven to be a powerful tool to compute several transport phenomena for porous media applications. Several samples have been created keeping the pore diameter as a constant, while the throat diameter connecting the pores is changing for a selected range of values in order to analyze the impact of the throat diameter on the permeability. A correlation to compute the permeability as a function of the throat diameter with a coefficient of determination of 95% has been proposed.