Patent ID: 7488366

Claim:
A ceramic porous body including a plurality of pores formed in a substrate made of a ceramic at a specified porosity; the substrate having predetermined end faces; and the pores connecting through the end faces of the substrate to each other and having branches, wherein when a cross-sectional plane image of the substrate cut along a predetermined plane is binarized by image analysis to distinguish a specified pore part derived from the pores from a specified non-pore part derived from the substrate, and a center line passing a central part of the pore part is drawn on the distinguished image, the porosity (ε (%)), a mean width (D P (μm)) of the pore part represented by a mean value of a distance, between outlines specifying the pore part and facing each other, perpendicular to the center line, a mean length (L (μm)) of the pore part represented by a mean value of a length of the center line between adjacent branch points among a plurality of specified branch points derived from the center line and a length of the center line between an end of the center line and the branch point adjacent to the end of the center line, and a mean pore size (D H (μm)) satisfy relations of the following equations (1) and (2): 200≦ε×( D P /2) 2 /L (1); and L≦D H /2 (2).