The analysis of the relations between porosity and tortuosity in granular beds

In the paper, functions describing different porosity-tortuosity relations were collected, and then the tortuosity values were calculated for a one granular bed consisting of spherical particles with normal distribution of diameters. Information about the bed porosity and particle sizes was obtained from measurements conducted for an artificial granular bed, consisting of glass marbles. The results of calculations were compared with the results of two other methods of tortuosity determination, performed for the same case (details are not described in this paper): the first of them uses the Path Tracking Method, the second one - information about the velocity components in a creeping flow (the Lattice-Boltzmann Method was applied to obtain the velocity field in the flow). The main aim of our article was to test whether the functions linking tortuosity with porosity, which are available in the literature, give similar results as the methods described above. To achieve this aim, the relative errors between results of calculations for the collected formulas and values from the both previous mentioned methods were calculated.