Abstract
Ceramic foams are promising, highly porous materials, with a wide range of specific surface area and low fluid flow resistance, which are well-suited for filtering applications. They are comprised mainly of macrovoids that are interconnected with struts. A branch-shaped reconstruction algorithm is introduced in the present work to reconstruct various ceramic foams from electron microscopy images using the Laguerre tessellation method. Subsequently, the reconstructed samples are used for the numerical calculation of pore structure and transport properties, including specific surface area, tortuosity, effective diffusivity, and flow permeability. Following comparison with experimental data, this reconstruction method is shown to be more reliable than typical analytical expressions that are suggested in the literature for the aforementioned structural and transport properties. Extracting the equivalent pore radius of the reconstructed domains offers improved accuracy of the analytical expressions for the permeability estimation.
Highlights
Ceramic foams are highly porous materials that are utilized in a wide spectrum of various technological applications [1,2]
The reconstruction process comprises of a Laguerre tessellation performed on a sphere arrangement and a branch placement algorithm
The method is validated against three ceramic foams with different pores per linear inch (PPI) densities
Summary
Ceramic foams are highly porous materials that are utilized in a wide spectrum of various technological applications [1,2]. Numerous efforts have been made to estimate the permeability of porous media that initially relied on experimental fitting [10], and later resulted in analytical models with specific and well-defined, yet simple, topologies [11,12,13,14]. Those analytical expressions are valid only for a specific range of porosities, as well as for a specific range of PPIs, with the foam topology usually being treated as an ordered arrangement of void cavities (pores) and solid, interconnected branches. The main challenge in the permeability evaluation using the aforementioned analytical expressions is Materials 2019, 12, 1137; doi:10.3390/ma12071137 www.mdpi.com/journal/materials
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