The Effect of Microstructure on Models for the Flow of a Bingham Fluid in Porous Media: One-Dimensional Flows

The Buckingham–Reiner models for the one-dimensional flow of a Bingham fluid along a uniform pipe or channel are well-known, but are modified here to cover much more general one-dimensional configurations. These include selections of channels with different widths, and five different probability density functions describing distributions of channel widths. It is found that the manner in which breakthrough occurs at the threshold pressure gradient depends very strongly on the type of distribution of pores and that a pseudo-threshold pressure gradient, which might be inferred from measurements of flow at relatively high pressure gradients, may be more than twice the magnitude of the true threshold gradient.