1989 Volume 39 Issue 218 Pages 349-354
The measurement of the effective porosity (φ e) of non-coated and side-coated intact granite cores (diameter: 4 cm; length: 0.5 to 20 cm) revealed that (φ e) is almost constant around 0.74% for all the cores. The coloring experiment of small pores in the intact granite core revealed that the pores are mainly distributed around and inside feldspars. The measurement of effective porosities of biotite, quartz and K-feldspar from pegmatite indicates that K-feldspar has a largest φ e of about 2% among these pegmatite minerals.
These results suggest the homogeneous and continuous distribution of small pores, mainly around and inside feldspars, in the intact granite core. Consequently, the intact granite can be treated as a kind of homogeneous porous media for the study of material transport such as the matrix diffusion of radionuclides which are supposed to be released with groundwater flows through fracture networks from the radioactive waste repository.
