Surface effects and pressure threshold of wet porous media

The surface effects, a hysteresis switch effect, of the wet saturated porous media resulting from gas flow into the free surface were investigated experimentally. The experiments showed that there is a pressure threshold occurring in a very thin layer of wet porous media when gas is forced into the media. The gas enters and keeps flowing through the media only when the gas pressure reaches the threshold. When the pressure drops down somewhere, the gas flow will be stopped and the resistance to gas being forced into the media will recover. For screened sand naturally deposited in water whose particle size ranges from 0.10mm to 0.45mm and size rate is 1:1.25, the pressure threshold is p{sub th} = 4.94d{sup {minus}0.772} Pa. After defining threshold size of the porous media as d{sub th} = 4{sigma}/p{sub th}, the relative size can be described as d{sub th}/d = 0.0549d{sup {minus}0.237}, which is getting larger as grain getting finer. The variation of d{sub th}/d with d agrees well with that of the dimensionless permeability {radical}k/d for the screened sands. The threshold size of the porous media can unify all the experimental results of the permeability-porosity, including that of full screened soil sand.