A reconstruction method of porous media integrating soft data with hard data

The three-dimensional reconstruction of porous media is of great significance to the research of mechanisms of fluid flow. The real three-dimensional structural data of porous media are helpful to describe the irregular topologic structures in porous media. The reconstruction of porous media will be inaccurate while only hard data or no conditional data are available. Reconstructed results can be more accurate, using soft data during reconstruction. Integrating soft data with hard data, a method based on multiple-point geostatistics (MPS) is proposed to reconstruct three-dimensional structures of porous media. The variogram curves and permeability, computed by lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), of the reconstructed images and the target image obtained from real volume data were compared, showing that the structural characteristics of reconstructed porous media using both soft data and hard data as conditional data are most similar to those of real volume data. Supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2006CB705805) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 10672159, 10702069)