Multiscale structures to describe porous media .1. Theoretical background and invasion by fluids

A porous medium with a broad pore-size distribution is described on the basis of the Multiscale Percolation System concept. The representative structure is the superposition of several constitutive elementary networks, of which mesh sizes are proportional to the diameter of the class of pores considered. To account for the contribution of each class to the connection of the medium, a recurrent building process, involving rescaling and superposition, is defined. This process leads to an equivalent monoscale network, involving elements representative of the various classes. Mercury intrusion at increasing pressure into a finite-size sample of this equivalent network is modelled. The inverse problem is solved, leading to the identification of the representative multiscale structure of a given material from the experimental intrusion curve.