FRAGMENTATION OF SOIL INITIATORS: APPLICATION OF THE PORE-SOLID FRACTAL MODEL

Abstract

The quantification of fragmentation of natural, polidisperse, porous media using fractal models is well documented in the literature. However, in many cases, fractal exponents (fractal fragmentation dimension) and coefficients (fractal lacunarity) arising from a power law behavior do not make clear differences between different media. In the present work, the pore-solid fractal (PSF) model was used as a new fractal approach for deriving four scaling parameters (fractal dimension of the particle-size distribution, fractal fragmentation dimension of the fragment-size distribution, probability of fragmentation and scaling factor) from soil initiators subjected to different energy density input. The fractal fragmentation dimension for all soil samples was Df=2.42±0.16 without correlating with the energy expended in the fragmentation process. By contrast, probability of fragmentation and scaling factor correlated significantly with the energetic term. The PSF model is useful for estimating a group of scaling parameters more appropriate for the quantification of complex patterns associated to fragment-size distributions.