Applying a cellular automaton model to describing the anomalous relaxation of the metastable states in the disordered porous media

Abstract

We propose a numerical model of outflow of the nonwetting liquid from previously completely filled nanoporous media based on cellular automata theory. It was shown that the relaxation of this system has an avalanche-like behaviour, which is inherent to phenomenon of self-organized criticality (SOC). Avalanche size and energy distributions were obtained. It was found that spectra have a typical for SOC theory power-law dependence N(s) ∼ s-β with β = 2.73, and N(E) ∼ E-βen with βen = 2.25.