Heterogeneity assessment based on average variations of morphological tortuosity for complex porous structures characterization

Abstract

Morphological characterization of porous media is of paramount interest, mainly due to the connections between their physicochemical properties and their porous microstructure geometry. Heterogeneity can be seen as a geometric characteristic of porous microstructures. In this paper, two novel topological descriptors are proposed, based on the M-tortuosity formalism. Using the concept of geometric tortuosity or morphological tortuosity, a first operator is defined, the H-tortuosity. It estimates the average variations of the morphological tortuosity as a function of the scale, based on Monte Carlo method and assessing the heterogeneity of porous networks. The second descriptor is an extension, named the H-tortuosity-by-iterativeerosions, taking into account different percolating particle sizes. These two topological operators are applied on Cox multi-scale Boolean models, to validate their behaviors and to highlight their discriminative power.