MACROSCOPIC POROUS MEDIUM RECONSTRUCTION FROM MICROSTRUCTURE ANALYSES

Hans-Olaf Pfannkuch has worked in many research fields related to the physics of groundwater flow throughout his long and productive career. Olaf's quantitative research contributions range from fundamental to applied and include analytical and numerical investigations such as reservoir hydrogeology through porous media parameterization, the optimization of monitoring well array design, contaminant fate and transport, wellhead protection, determination of seepage through lakebeds, and the application of fuzzy logic to environmental management.

As a new colleague of Olaf in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Minnesota I am learning almost daily about the many accomplishments of Olaf. So here I am presenting a comparatively small research contribution of mine that is however related to Olaf's previous work on porous media permeabilities. In this presentation I am discussing fluid pathway connectivity employing a percolation theory approach as well as calculating spatial correlation functions to reconstruct a porous medium and its permeability characteristics. Implications of this work include estimations of macroscopic permeabilities of a material based on the analysis of the material's microstructure. This approach can be useful when no (or no large-scale) permability measurements are available but estimates of a system's overall hydraulic properties are desirable.