LAUSR

Disordered multiphase porous media, ranging from rock, membranes, adsorbents, asphalt, wood, and concrete, to biological tissues, are ubiquitous. Their understanding is of fundamental importance, and their accurate characterization and modeling are critical to various branches of science and engineering. In most cases, however, one must confront the fact that experimental data and insights into the structure of porous media are limited. Thus, methods that can use limited information and construct models of porous media in order to assess their properties and study various phenomena in them are most cost-effective. Class approaches that have been developed over the past three decades to address the problem is based on what is usually referred to reconstruction: given a certain amount of data for a given heterogeneous porous medium, how can one develop a model for the medium that not only honors the data, but also provides accurate predictions for those properties of the medium for which no data are available, or are hard to measure, or were not used in the reconstruction? Thus, the class of such methods is quite broad, ranging from process-based approaches—those that try to mimic the processes that produce porous media of interest—and object-based techniques—those that treat the pore and grain structures as a set of objects that are defined based on a prior knowledge of the pore space—to statistical methods in which one tries to use various two-point spatial correlation functions to extract the maximum amount of information from images that are used to reconstruct the porous media, and combines them with an optimization algorithm, e.g., simulated annealing and the genetic algorithm. The research field of reconstruction has been very active and is still witnessing significant developments, due to the recent understanding of complex physics of porous media revealed by advanced imagining technologies. Further development of such methods still requires incorporating deep physical concepts and complexities of disordered media, which are expected to play a significant role in the future studies of all types of porous structures. Some examples are shown below.