Different porous materials exhibit widely varying pore structures, from foams and fibrous materials that have wide-open, highly interconnected pore spaces to geologic materials with limited connectivity and strong spatial correlations in pore structure. These differences in pore scale structure can have a strong effect on transport properties, especially multi-phase behavior, dispersion, particle transport, and fluid displacements.

Modern network models are often mapped directly from real materials. Because these network models are described using rigorous geometric parameters, they provide an excellent tool for pore-space characterization in addition to flow modeling. Quantitative parameters that can be extracted directly from the network data files include pore-size distributions, throat size distributions, pore interconnectivities, pore and throat surface areas, pore aspect ratios, throat cross sectional areas, and more.