Quantifying the impact of 3D pore space morphology on soil gas diffusion in loam and sand

Kurzfassung/Abstract

Effective diffusion is an important macroscopic property for assessing transport in porous media. Numerical computations on segmented 3D CT images yield precise estimates for diffusive properties. On the other hand, geometrical descriptors of pore space such as porosity, specific surface area and further transport-related descriptors can be easily computed from 3D CT images and are closely linked to diffusion processes. However, the investigation of quantitative relationships between these descriptors and diffusive properties for a diverse range of porous structures is still ongoing. In the present paper, we consider three different soil samples of each loam and sand for a total of six samples, whose 3D microstructure is quantitatively investigated using univariate as well as bivariate probability distributions of geometrical pore space descriptors. This information is used for investigating microstructure–property …