Pore Size Distribution in Granular Material Microstructure

M Mahdi Roozbahani; Rodrigo Borela; J David Frost

doi:10.3390/ma10111237

Pore Size Distribution in Granular Material Microstructure

Materials (Basel). 2017 Oct 27;10(11):1237. doi: 10.3390/ma10111237.

Authors

M Mahdi Roozbahani¹, Rodrigo Borela², J David Frost³

Affiliations

¹ Computational Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA. mahdir@gatech.edu.
² Computational Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA. rborelav@gatech.edu.
³ Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA. david.frost@ce.gatech.edu.

Abstract

Pore scale modeling plays a key role in fluid flow through porous media and associated macroscale constitutive relationships. The polyhedral shape and effective local pore size within granular material microstructure are computed in this study by means of the Euclidean Distance Transform (EDT), a local maxima search (non-maximum suppression), and a segmentation process. Various synthetic packed particles are simulated and employed as comparative models during the computation of pore size distribution (PSD). Reconstructed un-sheared and sheared Ottawa 20-30 sand samples are used to compute PSD for non-trivial and non-spherical models.

Keywords: 3D segmentation algorithm; digital material representation; granular material characterization; pore size distribution.