MULTIFRACTAL DESCRIPTION OF SIMULATED FLOW VELOCITY IN IDEALISED POROUS MEDIA BY USING THE SANDBOX METHOD

Abstract

The spatial description of flows in porous media is a main issue due to their influence on processes that take place inside. In addition to descriptive statistics, the multifractal analysis based on the Box-Counting fixed-size method has been used during last decade to study some porous media features. However, this method gives emphasis to domain regions containing few data points that spark the biased assessment of generalized fractal dimensions for negative moment orders. This circumstance is relevant when describing the flow velocity field in idealised three-dimensional porous media. The application of the Sandbox method is explored in this work as an alternative to the Box-Counting procedure for analyzing flow velocity magnitude simulated with the lattice model approach for six media with different porosities. According to the results, simulated flows have multiscaling behaviour. The multifractal spectra obtained with the Sandbox method reveal more heterogeneity as well as the presence of some extreme values in the distribution of high flow velocity magnitudes as porosity decreases. This situation is not so evident for the multifractal spectra estimated with the Box-Counting method. As a consequence, the description of the influence of porous media structure on flow velocity distribution provided by the Sandbox method improves the results obtained with the Box-Counting procedure.