Eric A. Wargo

Pore-Morphology-Based Simulation of Drainage in Porous Media Featuring a Locally Variable Contact Angle

Since the first publications by Hazlett (Transp Porous Med, 20:21–35, 1995) and Hilpert and Miller (Adv Water Res, 24:243–255, 2001), the pore-morphology-based method has been widely applied to determine the capillary pressure–saturation curves of porous media. The main advantage of the method is the simulation of a primary drainage process for large binary images using moderate computational time and memory compared to other two-phase flow simulations. Until now, the pore morphology model was restricted to totally wetting materials or those with a constant contact angle. Here, we introduce a similarly computationally efficient extension of the model that now enables the calculation of capillary pressure–saturation curves for porous media, where the contact angle varies locally within, due to a composite structure.

Microstructure Analysis Tools for Quantification of Key Structural Properties of Fuel Cell Materials

The objective of this work is to develop advanced microstructure analysis tools for direct quantification of the key structural properties of complex fuel cell materials. Computationally efficient algorithms have been developed to extract the key structural parameters from measured microstructure datasets of these materials. In addition to determination of the traditional structural measures (e.g., porosity, surface area, phase connectivity), two novel microstructure analysis techniques are introduced for the quantification of pore size and tortuosity distributions. For initial demonstration purposes, the methods developed are applied to a digitally reconstructed sample of the micro-porous layer (MPL) of a polymer electrolyte fuel cell (PEFC). The results produced from these analyses are compared to previously reported experimental and model-derived values where applicable.