SOME FRACTAL CHARACTERS OF POROUS MEDIA

TLDR

The study develops a unified model for the fractal characteristics of porous media and proposes a criterion to determine when fractal theory applies. The model’s predictions are benchmarked against prior models and box‑counting results, and a statistical property of porous media is derived from basic fractal theory. The model’s predictions agree well with previous models and box‑counting, and it is shown to be applicable to both exactly and statistically self‑similar fractal media.

Abstract

In this paper, a unified model for describing the fractal characters of porous media is deduced. The theoretical predictions from the proposed unified model are compared with those from the previous models and from the box-counting method. The results from the proposed model are found to be in good agreement with both the previous models and box-counting method. The results also indicate that the proposed unified model is applicable to both the exactly and statistically self-similar fractal media. A statistical property of porous media is also described based on the basic fractal theory and technique. A criterion, for determining whether a porous medium can be characterized by fractal theory and technique or not, is proposed based on the fractal statistical property.