@article{fdi:010075480,
  title = {{F}rom spheres to ellipsoids : speeding up considerably the morphological modeling of pore space and water retention in soils},
  author = {{K}emgue, {A}. {T}. and {M}onga, {O}livier and {M}oto, {S}. and {P}ot, {V}. and {G}arnier, {P}. and {B}aveye, {P}. {C}. and {B}ouras, {A}.},
  editor = {},
  language = {{ENG}},
  abstract = {{I}n recent years, technological advances have stimulated researchers to try to unravel the extremely complex microscale processes that control the activity of microorganisms in soils. {I}n particular, significant work has been carried out on the development of models able to accurately predict the microscale distribution of water, and the location of air water interfaces in pores. {A} comparison, by {P}ot et al. (2015), of two different modeling approaches with actual synchrotron-based tomography data, shows that a two-phase lattice {B}oltzmann model ({LBM}) is able to predict remarkably well the location of air water interfaces but is extremely slow, whereas a morphological model ({MOSAIC}), representing the pore space as a collection of spherical balls, provides a reasonable approximation of the observed air water interfaces when each ball is allowed to drain independently, but does so blazingly fast. {I}nterfaces predicted by {MOSAIC}, however, tend to have nonphysical shapes. {I}n that general context, the key objective of the research described in the present article, based on the same tomography data as {P}ot et al. (2015), was to find out to what extent the use of ellipsoids instead of spherical balls in {MOSAIC} could not appreciably speed up computations, or at least, at equal computational time, provide a quantitatively better approximation of water-air interfaces. {A}s far as we know, this is the first time an ellipsoids-based approximation of the soil pore space is proposed. {A} secondary objective was to assess whether ellipsoids might yield smoother, more physical, interfaces. {S}imulation results indicate that the use of ellipsoids provides a sizeable increase in accuracy in the prediction of air-water interfaces, an approximately 6-fold drop in computation time, and much more realistic-looking interfaces, compared to what is obtained with spherical balls. {T}hese observations are encouraging for the use of models based on geometric primitives to describe a range of microscale processes, and to address the still daunting issue of upscaling to the macroscopic scale.},
  keywords = {{P}ore scale ; {S}ynchroton {X}-ray micro computed tomography ; {S}oil air-water interfaces ; {C}omputational geometry ; 3{D} volume segmentation ; {M}orphological modeling},
  booktitle = {},
  journal = {{C}omputers and {G}eosciences},
  volume = {123},
  numero = {},
  pages = {20--37},
  ISSN = {0098-3004},
  year = {2019},
  DOI = {10.1016/j.cageo.2018.11.006},
  URL = {https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010075480},
}