The calculation of effective material properties of porous media based on the underlying 3D geometry had been established over the last years. In this context, the prediction of the permeability based on the pore geometry only is a very common example. For many industrial applications such as dewatering of paper, the porous media is partly saturated with significant changes of its properties such as the permeability, the gas diffusion, or the heat conductivity. Here, we present a new approach to predict these relative material properties based on its 3D pore space only which is a challenge up to now. Our method includes a drainage simulation based on morphological operations and the solution of appropriate PDEs. We demonstrate the capability of our approach for a prediction of relative material parameters of a carbon paper used as a diffusion media in a fuel cell.
Flow, heat conductivity, and gas diffusion in partly saturated microstructures
