Comprehensive Approach for Porous Materials Analysis Using a Dedicated Preprocessing Tool for Mass and Heat Transfer Modeling

The paper presents a comprehensive, newly developed software–poROSE (poROus materials examination SoftwarE) for the qualitative and quantitative assessment of porous materials and analysis methodologies developed by the authors as a solution for emerging challenges. A low porosity rock sample was analyzed and thanks to the developed and implemented methodologies in poROSE software, the main geometrical properties were calculated. A tool was also used in preprocessing part of the computational analysis to prepare a geometrical representation of the porous material. The basic functions as elimination of blind pores in the geometrical model were completed and the geometrical model was exported for CFD software. As a result, it was possible to carry out calculations of the basic properties of the analyzed porous material sample. The developed tool allows to carry out quantitative and qualitative analysis to determine the most important properties characterized porous materials. In presented tool the input data can be images from X-ray computed tomography (CT), scanning electron microscope (SEM) or focused ion beam with scanning electron microscope (FIB-SEM) in grey level. A geometric model developed in the proper format can be used as an input to modeling mass, momentum and heat transfer, as well as, in strength or thermo-strength analysis of any porous materials. In this example, thermal analysis was carried out on the skeleton of rock sample. Moreover, thermal conductivity was estimated using empirical equations.