Permeability modeling for porous transducer of liquid-circular angular accelerometer

This paper is concerned with the permeability modeling for a kind of porous transducer, which is sintered by glass microspheres. This kind of transducer is used to measure the streaming potential in the liquid-circular angular accelerometer. Kozeny-Carman (KC) equation is improved by taking into account the shape of fluid channel, the porosity of porous transducer, and the particle size distribution (PSD) of glass microspheres in the transducer. Under the assumption of star-like fluid channels, the shape factor is analyzed numerically and further evaluated. The notion of equivalent diameter of microspheres is applied to avoid the error of permeability calculation resulting from the usage of the average diameter. By implementing the experiments of transducers with 9 different PSDs, a relationship among the equivalent diameter, the tortuosity, the average diameter, the porosity and the skewness of the PSD is obtained. The comparison results illustrate that the proposed permeability model considerably reduces the large prediction errors of the previous models when dealing with the mixture of different microspheres and the large skewness of PSD.