High-precision synthetic computed tomography of reconstructed porous media

Multiscale simulation of transport in disordered and porous media requires microstructures covering several decades in length scale. X-ray and synchrotron computed tomography are presently unable to resolve more than one decade of geometric detail. Recent advances in pore scale modeling [Biswal, Held, Khanna, Wang, and Hilfer, Phys. Rev. E 80, 041301 (2009)] provide strongly correlated microstructures with several decades in microstructural detail. A carefully calibrated microstructure model for Fontainebleau sandstone has been discretized into a suite of three-dimensional microstructures with resolutions from roughly 128 μm down to roughly 500 nm. At the highest resolution the three-dimensional image consists of 32768^{3}=35184372088832 discrete cubic volume elements with gray values between 0 and 216. To the best of our knowledge, this synthetic image is the largest computed tomogram of a porous medium available at present.