Yield stress fluids method to determine the pore size distribution of a porous medium

In this paper a new method is presented in order to determine the pore size distribution in a porous medium. This original technique uses the rheological properties of some non-Newtonian yield stress fluids flowing through the porous sample. This technique is based on the capillary bundle model (like the other classical methods) which, despite its apparent simplicity, is capable of properly characterizing the percolating pore size distribution. Then this distribution can be simply obtained from the measurement of the total flow rate as a function of the imposed pressure gradient. The present technique is successfully tested analytically and numerically for usual pore size distributions such as the Gaussian mono and multimodal distributions, using Bingham and Casson fluids. The technique can also be extended to any yield stress fluid and any kind of distribution.