| Abstract: | Porous materials play an important role in many applications. The performance of these materials is determined by their microstructure, but there is currently no systematic method to derive relations between their microstructure and macroscopic properties. I will review a recently proposed method to derive such relations. A significant ingredient of this method is the quantification of the local structure by means of a tensor that captures the microstructural characteristics most relevant to a number of physical properties. This tensor describes the shape of volume elements called quadrons. This description is then used in an entropy-based statistical mechanical formalism (Edwards and Oakeshott, Physica A 157, 1989; Blumenfeld and Edwards 2003, 2006) to obtain macroscopic structural properties as expectation values.
I will discuss the results of the application of the quadron description to numerically generated structures.
Webpage: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/earthscienceandengineering/people/phdstudents/g-j/hriki |
