Transport pathways within percolating pore space networks of granular materials

Granular media can be regarded as a mixture of two components: grains and the material filling the voids or pores between the grains. Pore properties give rise to a range of applications such as modelling ground water flow, carbon capture and sequestration. The grains within a dense granular material respond to deformation (e.g., shearing or compression) by rearranging to create local zones of compression and zones of dilatation (i.e., regions of high pore space). Descriptions of the deformation are typically focused on analysis of the solid skeleton via topology of physical contact networks of grains but an
alternative perspective is to consider network representations of the evolving anisotropic pore space. We demonstrate how to construct pore space networks that express the local size of voids about a grain through network edge weights. We investigate sectors of the loading history when a percolating giant component of the pore space network exists. At these states the grains are in a configuration more prone to the efficient transport of material (e.g., fluid flow, mineral/gas deposits). These pathways can be found through examination of the weighted shortest paths percolating the boundaries of the material. In particular,
network weights biased towards large void space results in efficient percolating pathways traversing the shear band in the direction of principal stress within a 2D granular assembly subject to high strains.