Microstructure-Property Relationship in Randomly Packed Mono-sized Structures

Team Members

  • Jie (Jessie) Cao - Civil and Environmental Engineering
  • Mahdi Roozbahani - Computational Science and Engineering

Project Goals

Extract structure-property linkages in the mono-sized packed spherical particles

  • Structure: mono-packed particles
  • Property: Permeability

Background

  • Random Loose packed spherical particles is a common packed structure,which is frequently used in many fields such as powder technology, soil mechanics, and material science, etc.
  • Permability is a significant transport property of porous media. It can be computed either by the numerical simulation or empirical equations (Kozny-Carman equation).

Source of Structure Datasets

  • Gravitational Sphere Packing Simulation

Mono-sized Loosely Packed Particles

Voxelized packed bed (a) both particle and pore space, (b) particle space only, and (c) pore space only

The packed structure will be simulated by the new Gravitational Sphere Packing Simulation. More information about this simulation can be found in this link.

Details of Structure Datasets

  • Tortousity
  • Porosity
  • 2-point statistics

Proposed Next Steps

  • Implement simulations based on the gravitational sphere packing approach

  • If we can come up with the numerical results for permeability such as Lattice-Boltzmann method, we can do two parts of work:

    (1) correlate 2-point statistics to permeability through PCA and regression analyses

    (2) correlate structure properties to permeability (propose new equation)

  • Compare two approaches: 2-point statistics-permeability and structure-permeability.

References