Filtration of precipitated silica aggregates: Length scales, percolation threshold and yielding behaviour

•Quantification of two main sub-micrometric length scales for industrial silica systems.•Assessment of creep resistance during filtration by osmotic compression.•A percolation threshold builds in the concentrated systems.•Continuous network withstands compression over a large range of pressure.•We model the filtration experiments by a pseudo-continuum porous medium.

Reinforcing precipitated silica systems have a complex hierarchical structure consisting of a branched network made of connected clusters composed of small silica beads welded together into larger dense aggregates. Here, we study the evolution of such structural features during a filtration process. The typical behaviour is that the cakes formed at constant pressure do not reorganize at local scale during a filtration experiment. Accordingly, the creep resistance of a precipitated silica network is high. Overall, there is a percolation threshold, which appears when the branches are pushed into each other. Once this percolation path is reached, the cake withstands compression over more than a decade of applied pressure. Beyond, it seemed useful to make predictions of the filtration properties knowing the typical length scales – small silica beads, dense aggregates, and consolidation behaviour of the cake. A simple approach introducing the concept of an effective medium approximation into Darcy’s law was tested. This approach treats the network as a pseudo-continuum of porous medium built at two main length scales: the size of dense aggregates and a length scale representing the typical distance between the aggregates. The quality of the fit of experimental filtration rates by this simple model indicates that a description based on a continuous network made of two material phases is accurate.

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