Visual analysis of experimental micro-CT data of evaporation in porous media

Abstract

Recently there is a high increase in the research of porous materials studying multiphase flow and transport. Pores within a porous medium can be on a small or large scale. The intricate connections between any two pores can be extracted as a pore network. Pore scale modelling and pore network graph can be used to study physical effects that are important for geologists, biologists and engineers for application in soil remediation, medication transport and fuel cell development. The goal in this work is to study the evaporation of water within porous media. While structure information in form of the pore network graph is provided, geometric and abstract properties such as saturation, shortest paths from fluid to material boundaries and tortuosity of the paths, are computed to analyze the effect on evaporation processes. We approach, visualize and analyze these properties using scientific and information visualization. Three phases, water, gas and solid, were reconstructed from the experimental micro-CT data. An intermediate task is to repair the polygon meshes, to allow the calculation of properties. For this, we present an effective and feasible process using CGAL. We present an effective method to calculate pore size and pore volume for saturation calculation. We present an alternative approach to represent the tortuosity of a path and compare it with an approach proposed in literature.