Behaviour of Fluids in Porous Materials

The pore structure and the presence of open and close porosity has always made difficult the study of the interaction between fluids and porous materials, being complicated the analysis of liquids wettability and permeability, capillarity or speed of wetting, among others. This work tries to deal with these problems in a simple way, from a theoretical point of view, applying hydrostatic laws and the effect of capillarity to address the effect of open porosity. Moreover, surface roughness of these materials is the consequence of surface finishing (e.g. polishing) and porosity. This work also faces this aspect of wettability of surfaces, important to understand sealing conditions or lubricant retention in powder metallurgical components. From a practical point of view, the speed of fluids through metallic filters is compared to that through metallic meshes.