Mercury porosimetry: state of the art

Mercury porosimetry is used extensively for the characterization of various aspects of porous media and powders. It is difficult to make a reliable estimate, but the order of magnitude of the total number of mercury porosimeters in use is something like 2000. There are a number of other techniques which provide a similar type of information, for example vapour sorption and sorption hysteresis (including the B.E.T. isotherm), micrography and E.M. micrography, flow and diffusion of gases through porous media, socalled suction c-es, and fluid evaporation velocity. The range of application of all these techniques overlaps at least partly with that of mercury porosimetry, and more often than not, mercury porosiinetry is used in combination with some other technique. Using one of the commercially available mercury porosimeters, this technique provides one of the most simple and rapid techniques to obtain a kind of ‘fingerprint’ of a porous medium. Of course, it does not follow that the tigerprint in all its aspects truly represents the porous medium, and it is even less certain that the interpretation of the fingerprint will make any sense. As early as 1842, Smelxna [l] mentioned the posibility of forcing mercury into wood to prove its porous stxucture. But it was not

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