A Geometrically Exact Treatment of Percolation Through Voids around Faceted Regular and Structurally Disordered Grains

Abstract

Fluid and charge flow through interstitial volumes among impermeable randomly placed grains in porous materials ceases to occur at a critical concentration where networks of void volumes are disrupted at macroscopic scales. This critical density for void percolation can be difficult to calculate due to the irregular shape of the void regions. We develop and implement a geometrically exact method, scaling only linearly in the system volume, for identifying the shape and size of contiguous voids. In this manner, we calculate percolation thresholds for both grain cluster percolation (where system spanning networks of overlapping grains begin to appear with increasing density) and void percolation at much higher grain concentrations where networks of interstitial volumes no longer exist on macroscopic scales. For both the former and the latter, we calculate critical concentrations for inclusions in the shape of the Platonic solids (as well as truncated icosahedra) for both aligned and randomly oriented grains. In the case of critical densities for void percolation, the accuracy of our results is significantly improved relative to prior benchmarks. We also incorporate structural disorder of inclusions by considering impermeable grains in the form of cubes subject to a series of randomly placed and oriented fracture planes to mimic aggressively fractured inclusions found in nature. As the number of sustained slices becomes large, we find that the critical porosity for void percolation tends to 5%