Moving across scales: a quantitative assessment of X-ray CT to measure the porosity of rocks
File(s)poroxray_150831.pdf (6.52 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Pini, R
Madonna, C
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
We apply multidimensional X-ray CT to quantify the porosity of Berea Sandstone by using both medical- and synchrotron-based X-ray radiation, so as to produce images of the same sample with mm- and micron-resolution, respectively. Three different samples are used and the obtained tomograms are compared by considering the spatial distribution of porosity values for the range of voxel sizes 0.25-16 mm3. The agreement between the two independent techniques is assessed by means of the concordance correlation coefficient. Statistically significant correlations are found for each sample up to the maximum resolution of the medical CT scanner, i.e. for images with a voxel size of (0.5x0.5x1) mm3. The direct comparison of images obtained by medical- and synchrotron-based X-ray radiation has a dual benefit. First, it objectively informs the segmentation step required for the binarization of the high-resolution synchrotron images that is otherwise prone to operator bias; in this context, the applicability of the proposed workflow is demonstrated with two widely applied locally adaptive thresholding algorithms, namely the hysteresis and the watershed methods. Secondly, once this calibration has occurred, the coupling of the two techniques allows analyzing porosity heterogeneity across a range of length-scales that spans over more than eight orders of magnitudes. We anticipate that the ability to perform a true multi-scale experiment may represent the required point of departure for developing up-scaling approaches that capture the inherently complex heterogeneity of rocks.
Date Issued
2016-04-01
Date Acceptance
2015-10-12
Citation
Journal of Porous Materials, 2016, 23 (2), pp.325-338
ISSN
1380-2224
Publisher
Springer
Start Page
325
End Page
338
Journal / Book Title
Journal of Porous Materials
Volume
23
Issue
2
Copyright Statement
© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015. The final publication is available at Springer via https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10934-015-0085-8
Identifier
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10934-015-0085-8
Subjects
X-ray CT
Image segmentation
Porosity heterogeneity
Reservoir rocks
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2015-10-19