Transport pathways within percolating pore space networks of granular materials

Abstract

Granular media can be regarded as a mixture of two components: grains and the material filling the voids or pores between the grains. Pore properties give rise to a range of applications such as modelling ground water flow, carbon capture and sequestration. The grains within a dense granular material respond to deformation (e.g., shearing or compression) by rearranging to create local zones of compression and zones of dilatation (i.e., regions of high pore space). Descriptions of the deformation are typically focused on analysis of the solid skeleton via topology of physical contact networks of grains but an alternative perspective is to consider network representations of the evolving aniso..