Numerical analysis of capillarity in packed spheres: Planar hexagonal-packed spheres

Replication Processing of Highly Porous Materials

“…First ingress of the non-wetting infiltrant into the preform occurs at a certain "threshold pressure"; a large fraction, but not all, of the open pore space is then infiltrated. This threshold pressure can be estimated as that required to drive a non-wetting liquid past a single plane of close-packed spheres; numerical simulations show that this is roughly ten times the infiltrant surface tension r LV divided by the particle radius R. [63] Surface tensions of molten metals are typically on the order of one J m -2 : one atmosphere will cause ingress of the metal into a preform of particles 100 lm in radius or above. An alternative empirical expression given in [64] yields similar results.…”

A level set method for determining critical curvatures for drainage and imbibition

“…In a porous medium imbibition simulation, at each curvature decrement the software adjusts surface vertex positions to achieve equilibrium. Hilden and Trumble [14] used Surface Evolver to determine the capillary pressure required to displace a liquid in a planar array of hexagonally packed spheres. Although Surface Evolver simulation of critical curvatures in pore level events (rupture and coalescence of pendular rings) in our laboratory [15] agreed with theoretical predictions, topology changes such as the merger of three pendular rings shown in Fig.…”

Predicting the film and lens water volume between soil particles using particle size distribution data

“…As the consequence of these two antagonistic effects, the e i remains nearly constant with the porosity. However, the lens water theory is often used to predict the e i for uniform particles (e.g., see Rose, 1958;Orr et al, 1975;Hilden and Trumble, 2003); in this study we estimated the e i for all size-classes of soil particles in a wide range of matric suction heads.…”