Hydraulic permeability of polydispersed cake layers: an analytic approach

An analytic method is introduced to calculate hydraulic permeability of porous media composed of polydispersed spheres with log-normal and normal (Gaussian) distributions of particle sizes. From the comparison of the permeability for the two particle-size distributions, it was observed that a medium with normally distributed particle sizes consistently has a lower permeability than a medium with log-normally distributed particle sizes. This phenomenon is due to the larger number of smaller particles in the normal distribution, which results in greater cake resistance. The specific resistance of the cake layer is computed by taking the inverse of the permeability.