June 2015

On the representative elementary volumes of clay rocks at the mesoscale

Regarding clay rock at the mesoscale (that is, millimeter to centimeter), the structure of the porous clay matrix treated as continuum controls transport properties. Upscaling these mesoscale properties to the macroscale requires that representative elementary volumes (REVs) exists. The objective of this paper is to quantify the mesoscale REVs of the continuous clay matrix. Here, the REV is defined as the minimum volume...

Author(s): Lukas M. Keller