Reconstruction of the microstructure based on hierarchical simulated annealing with erosion method

Abstract

The microstructure of porous media directly affects its macroscopic properties (such as mechanical properties, electromagnetic properties, capillary properties and transport properties). As for sandstone, the distribution of pore has an important effect on the conductivity and transport properties. In this paper, a novel modeling scheme based on hierarchical simulated annealing with erosion method (HSAE), which can reconstruct more accurate microstructure than that of hierarchical simulated annealing method (HSA) and simulated annealing method (SA), is proposed and applied to the optimization of microstructure reconstruction. In the paper, the two-point correlation function (S2(r)) obtained from two-dimensional (2D) reference image is used to reconstruct its corresponding microstructure. From the result of the 2D reconstruction, it is found that the phase distribution for the reconstructed image of our proposed method is more similar to the original image than that of HSA reconstruction and SA reconstruction, which illustrates that our proposed method can generate more similar morphological information as that of the original image. The comparison of the two-point cluster function between the reconstructed microstructures and the reference image indicates that our proposed method can improve the accuracy of reconstruction. Next, HSAE, HSA and SA methods are used to reconstruct the three-dimensional (3D) microstructures from the 2D slices. The comparison of the permeability between the original 3D microstructures and those of the reconstructions shows that the permeability of the reconstructions by our proposed method is more close to that of the original 3D microstructures. The reconstruction time of HSAE method is shorter than that of SA method, and longer than that of HSA method. That is because the pixels participating in HSAE reconstruction is less than that of SA reconstruction, and more than that of HSA reconstruction.