Pore scale definition and computation from tomography data Original Research Article

During recent years characterisation capabilities of porous media have been transformed by advances in computation and visualisation technologies. It is now possible to obtain detailed topological and hydrodynamic information of porous media by combining tomographic and computational fluid dynamic studies. Despite the existence of these new capabilities, the characterisation process itself is based on the same antiquated experimental macroscopic concepts.The present work addresses a key step in the information up-scaling process, i.e. a pore identification algorithm similar to alternating sequential filters. In a preliminary study, topological and hydrodynamic variables are correlated with the pore size. Micrometre and millimetre resolution tomographies are used to characterise the pore size distribution of a packed column and different rocks. Finally, we compute the inter-pore-scale redistribution function which is a measure of the heterogeneity of the media and magnitude needed in multi-scale modelling.