Permeability

Introduction:

Permeability is an important material property of porous and granular materials such as rocks,
sands, and soils. The accurate measurement or estimations are very important in modeling the flow
through porous media as its relevance to hydrology, soil mechanics, oil industry, and environment
protections. There are two fundamental ways to obtain the estimation of permeability: experimental
measurement and estimation via theoretical modeling. The experimental method measures the flow
through a small sample in a laboratory, then the permeability is calculated. The permeability
obtained this way is the averaged result from the representative volume and is not generally
applicable in real large flow simulations. The up scaling is to try to bridge the gap between laboratory
results and the field parameters. The theoretical estimation of permeability provides a good
approximation by using an idealized networks of tubes/pipes through which the fluid flows, and the
flow in the pipes is considered as 1-D flow with prescribed pressure or boundary conditions. The
networks are generally treated as regular although recent studies begin focus on the fractal structure
or statistical features. However, it is very difficult to model the detail flow patterns in random media
where different sizes of particles and different porosities are presented. The common approach is to
use an averaged representative volume with regular averaged particle size and uniform porosity.
The SI unit for permeability is m2. A practical unit for permeability is the darcy (d), or more commonly
the millidarcy (md). (1 darcy ≈10−12m2).