title: Fluids in porous media. I. A hard sponge model.
abstract: The morphology of many porous materials is spongelike. Despite the abundance of such materials, simple models which allow for a theoretical description of these materials are still lacking. Here, we propose a hard sponge model which is made by digging spherical cavities in a solid continuum. We found an analytical expression for describing the interaction potential between fluid particles and the spongelike porous matrix. The diagrammatic expansions of different correlation functions are derived as well as that of grand potential. We derived also the Ornstein-Zernike (OZ) equations for this model. In contrast to Madden-Glandt model of random porous media [W. G. Madden and E. D. Glandt, J. Stat. Phys. 51, 537 (1988)], the OZ equations for a fluid confined in our hard sponge model have some similarity to the OZ equations of a three-component fluid mixture. We show also how the replica method can be extended to study our sponge model and that the same OZ equations can be derived also from the extended replica method.
authors.affiliation: School of Theoretical Physics and School of Material Science and Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, China.
authors.forename: S L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.forename: W
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Dong
authors.forename: Q H
authors.initials: QH
authors.lastname: Liu
mesh_terms: D000042:Absorption; D001672:Biocompatible Materials / Q000737:chemistry*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004058:Diffusion; D044085:Microfluidics / Q000379:methods*; D008956:Models, Chemical; D008958:Models, Molecular; D016062:Porosity; D012996:Solutions; D013499:Surface Properties
chemical_list: D001672:Biocompatible Materials; D012996:Solutions