Hans-Rudolf Kuensch

Seminar for Statistics
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

Leonhardstraße 27
8092 Zürich
Switzerland

email: kuensch [at] stat.math.ethz [dot] ch

abstract:

Stochastic geometry and transport and flow properties of porous media

In soil physics, the effect of geometric properties of the pore space on flow and transport properties is still poorly understood. In particular, one would like to know which geometric properties of the pore space have a strong influence on the flow properties. Recently, there has been a lot of progress in imaging technology allowing to map the pore space of some soils very accurately. Still, such images are costly and therefore for a systematic investigation of the relation between geometric characteristics and flow properties it would be useful to be able to simulate quickly pore spaces with given geometric characteristics. I will briefly report on a joint project with soil scientists from ETH Zurich and numerical analysts from TU Braunschweig where we have started such an investigation. In particular, we have generated Boolean models with different values of the specific Minkowski functionals and studied how this affects flow properties. Unfortunately, the Boolean model is not able to generate samples that are visually close to real pore spaces, and it seems that for the prediction of flow properties the Minkowski functionals must be combined with information on the pore size distribution.
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