ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we give an overview of these various approaches (with the exception of microscopic approaches), with a special focus on pore-network and continuum approaches.
Before presenting the various simulation approaches, it is worth mentioning the concept of digital porous media. Digital porous media refer to numerical porous structures. These numerical porous structures can be used as input data for the approaches described in Sections 1.3 through 1.5, especially with regard to the direct and the pore-network approaches. Three-dimensional (3D) numerical porous structures can be obtained, for example, from direct imaging of real porous media using micro x-ray computerised tomography (Coker et al., 1996, Manke et al., 2011), nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (Baldwin et al., 1996) or focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy (Karwacki et al., 2011). As an example, Figure 1.2 shows the reconstructed
image of a real random packing of spherical particles obtained using micro x-ray computerised tomography (Horgue 2012).
