Characteristics of porous beds based on fractal parameters

The paper presents the results of a fractal analysis of the cross-sections of a porous mineral deposit consisting of spherical elements which formed a spatial system with varying porosity (0.4 to 0.95). The virtual deposit was generated using the Discrete Element Method in the YADE code by means of the so-called Radius Expansion Method. The fractal analysis was carried out using the structure function method, determining the fractal dimension (D), the topothesy (L) and the corner frequency (l) (MAINSAH et al. 2001). The conducted simulations have confirmed to a considerable extent the test results available in the literature involving the fractal analysis of mineral deposits with varying porosity. They clearly indicate that the fractal dimension does not change along with the porosity of the deposit, if the autocorrelation function or their transformations (e.g. structure function) methods are used. Moreover, based on the information available in the literature, it can be concluded that the value of the fractal dimension corresponds to mineral deposits with the specified geometric shapes of the elements which form them.