Statistics of highly heterogeneous flow fields confined to three-dimensional random porous media

Abstract

We present a strong relationship between the microstructural characteristics of, and the fluid velocity fields confined to, three-dimensional random porous materials. The relationship is revealed through simultaneously extracting correlation functions Ruu(r) of the spatial (Eulerian) velocity fields and microstructural two-point correlation functions S2(r) of the random porous heterogeneous materials. This demonstrates that the effective physical transport properties depend on the characteristics of complex pore structure owing to the relationship between Ruu(r) and S2(r) revealed in this study. Further, the mean excess plot was used to investigate the right tail of the streamwise velocity component that was found to obey light-tail distributions. Based on the mean excess plot, a generalized Pareto distribution can be used to approximate the positive streamwise velocity distribution.