Relationships between porosity, median size, and sorting coefficients of synthetic sands

Abstract

Abstract The relationship between porosity, median size, and sorting coefficients has been investigated by studying synthetic sands with lognormal size distributions and various median sizes and sorting coefficients. Poorly sorted sands are considerably less porous than well sorted ones, and porosities show an inverse linear relationship to sorting coefficient except in very well sorted samples in which porosity increases more rapidly than sorting. Porosity is independent of median size in well sorted sands but appears to decrease slightly with increasing median size in poorly sorted sands. The relationship between median size and porosity probably results from the fact that larger grains have a higher sphericity and tend to pack more closely together than smaller, more irregularly shaped grains.