Identification of the pore size distribution of a porous medium by yield stress fluids using Herschel-Bulkley model

In this paper, we present a new method to determine the pore-size distribution (PSD) in a porous medium. This innovative technique uses the rheological properties of non-Newtonian yield stress fluids flowing through the porous sample. In a first approach, the capillary bundle model will be used. The PSD is obtained from the measurement of the total flow rate of fluid as a function of the imposed pressure gradient magnitude. The mathematical processing of the experimental data, which depends on the type of yield stress fluid, provides an overview of the pore size distribution of the porous material. The technique proposed here was successfully tested analytically and numerically for usual pore size distributions such as the Gaussian mono and multimodal distributions. The study was conducted for yield stress fluids obeying the classical Bingham model and extended to the more realistic Herschel-Bulkley model. Unlike other complex methods, expensive and sometimes toxic, this technique presents a lower cost, requires simple measurements and is easy to interpret. This new method could become in the future an alternative, non-toxic and cheap method for the characterization of porous materials.