Objectives: Determine the relationship between grain packing and porosity of an aquifer.
1. Porosity describes the percentage of void space in a cubic unit (volume) of an aquifer. This porosity is controlled by the packing (geometry) of grains. In this problem we are going to explore the simplest of packing: Cubic Packing. As a warm up we will first look at the porosity of a single grain of sand inside a cubic value of aquifer. The second part of this problem will explore cubic packing with eight grains inside a square volume of aquifer. Use the foldable aquifer model provided to answer the following questions.
A. Determine the porosity of the cubic aquifer with a single spherical grain.
B. Determine the porosity of an aquifer with cubic packing.
C. Explain the relationship between the porosity of the single spherical grain model and the cubic pacing model with eight grains.
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