Douglas Craig Scott

An Assessment of Reasonable Tortuosity Values

Tortuosity is a simple concept which is easily understood; however, not all scientific literature shows an appreciation for reasonable tortuosity values. In the context of diffusional matrices, tortuosity ( ) is traditionally defined as the ratio of effective path length which a diffusing molecule takes (Le), to the shortest straight-line and straight-forward distance (L), from the “starting point” to the “ending point,” as represented by Eq. 1.