Toward a New Method of Porosimetry: Principles and Experiments

Current experimental methods used to determine pore size distributions (PSD) of porous media present several drawbacks such as toxicity of the employed fluids (e.g., mercury porosimetry). The theoretical basis of a new method to obtain the PSD by injecting yield stress fluids through porous media and measuring the flow rate at several pressure gradients was proposed in the literature. On the basis of these theoretical considerations, an intuitive approach to obtain PSD from is presented in this work. It relies on considering the extra increment of when is increased, as a consequence of the pores of smaller radius newly incorporated to the flow. This procedure is first tested and validated on numerically generated experiments. Then, it is applied to exploit data coming from laboratory experiments and the obtained PSD show good agreement with the PSD deduced from mercury porosimetry.