Reproducing the microXCT observations of air-water distribution in porous media by revised pore morphology method

This study presents a novel and simple morphology approach to generate two-dimensional air–water distribution in porous media considering Or and Tuller’s cavitation mechanism (published in 2002). The connectedness condition for the nonwetting phase is replaced by the Laplace equation. An algorithm is developed to detect the ruptured water spaces that are incorrectly formed in the throat by the morphology approach, but cannot exist in a real thermodynamic equilibrium system. The distributions of soil moisture, water retention curve, and air–liquid interface area at different saturations predicted by this method are in a good quantitative agreement with the experimental observations on glass beads and Ottawa sand from micro X-raycomputed tomography (microXCT). Compared to Lu et al.’s Monte Carlo lattice-gas approach (published in 2010), another computational method to generate the soil moisture distribution, the proposed approach provides better results with significantly less computational power.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author