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The purpose of this paper is to present a fully automated numerical tool for computing the effective permeability of porous media from digital images which come from the modern imagery technique.

The permeability is obtained by the homogenization process applied to a periodic rigid solid in which the fluid flow is described by the Stokes equations. The unit cell problem is solved by using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm, well adapted for the microstructures defined by voxels.

Various 3-D examples are considered to show the capacity of the method. First, the case of flow through regular arrays of aligned cylinders or spheres are considered as benchmark problems. Next, the method is applied to some more complex and realistic porous solids obtained with assemblies of overlapping spherical pores having identical or different radii, regularly or randomly distributed within the unit cell.

The use of FFT allows the resolution of high-dimension problems and open various possibilities for computing the permeability of porous microstructures coming from X-ray microtomography.

The paper deals with the development of an improved fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based numerical method for computing the effective properties of composite conductors. The convergence of the basic FFT-based methods is recognized to depend drastically on the contrast between the phases. For instance, the primal formulation is not suited for solving the problems with high conductivity whereas the dual formulation is computationally costly for problems with high resistivity. Consequently, it raises the problem of computing the properties of composites containing both highly conductive and resistive inclusions.

In the present work, the authors' propose a new iterative scheme for solving that kind of problems which is formulated in term of the polarization.

The capability and relevance of this iterative scheme is illustrated through numerical implementation in the case of composites containing squared inclusions. It is shown that the rate of convergence is increased and thus, particularly when the case of high contrasts is considered. The predominance of the polarization based iterative scheme (PBIS) over existing ones is also illustrated in the case of a composite containing both highly conductive and highly resistive inclusions.

The method is easy to implement and uses the same ingredients as the basic schemes: the FFT and the exact expression of the Green tensor in the Fourier space. Moreover, its convergence conditions do not depend on the conductivity properties of the constituents, which then constitutes the main difference with other existing iterative schemes. The method can then be applied for computing the effective properties of composites conductors with arbitrary contrasts.