Porous Medium

A porous medium (or a porous material) is a material containing pores (voids). The skeletal portion of the material is often called the "matrix" or "frame". The pores are typically filled with a fluid (liquid or gas). The skeletal material is usually a solid, but structures like foams are often also usefully analyzed using concept of porous media.

A porous medium is most often characterised by its porosity. Other properties of the medium (e.g., permeability, tensile strength, electrical conductivity) can sometimes be derived from the respective properties of its constituents (solid matrix and fluid) and the media porosity and pores structure, but such a derivation is usually complex. Even the concept of porosity is only straightforward for a poroelastic medium.

Often both the solid matrix and the pore network (also known as the pore space) are continuous, so as to form two interpenetrating continua such as in a sponge. However, there is also a concept of closed porosity and effective porosity, i.e., the pore space accessible to flow.

Many natural substances such as rocks and soil (e.g., aquifers, petroleum reservoirs), zeolites, biological tissues (e.g. bones, wood, cork), and man made materials such as cements and ceramics can be considered as porous media. Many of their important properties can only be rationalized by considering them to be porous media.

The concept of porous media is used in many areas of applied science and engineering: filtration, mechanics (acoustics, geomechanics, soil mechanics, rock mechanics), engineering (petroleum engineering, bio-remediation, construction engineering), geosciences (hydrogeology, petroleum geology, geophysics), biology and biophysics, material science, etc. Fluid flow through porous media is a subject of most common interest and has emerged a separate field of study. The study of more general behaviour of porous media involving deformation of the solid frame is called poromechanics.