Experimental determination of the viscous flow permeability of porous materials by measuring reflected low frequency acoustic waves

Abstract

An acoustic reflectivity method is proposed for measuring the permeability or flow resistivity of air-saturated porous materials. In this method, a simplified expression of the reflection coefficient is derived in the Darcy's regime (low frequency range), which does not depend on frequency and porosity. Numerical simulations show that the reflection coefficient of a porous material can be approximated by its simplified expression obtained from its Taylor development to the first order. This approximation is good especially for resistive materials (of low permeability) and for the lower frequencies. The permeability is reconstructed by solving the inverse problem using waves reflected by plastic foam samples, at different frequency bandwidths in the Darcy regime. The proposed method has the advantage of being simple compared to the conventional methods that use experimental reflected data, and is complementary to the transmissivity method, which is more adapted to low resistive materials (high permeability).