CO₂ injection into underground geological formations, particularly saline aquifers, causes the removal of water by evaporation into the CO₂-rich phase. This process triggers salt nucleation and precipitation inside the pores, and therefore, alters the petrophysical properties of the formation rock.
In the context of CO₂ storage, several experimental studies have been conducted at pore and...
In this study, an image processing framework was proposed for mapping Ca(OH)2 dissolution, CaCO3 precipitation, and pore volume change of wellbore cement samples exposed to high concentration CO2 under laboratory-simulated geologic CO2 storage conditions. The main workflow covered in this framework is to, 1) remove noises, artifacts, beam hardening effects, etc. from micro-CT images of cement...
In enhanced oil recovery, gas injection often suffers from poor sweep efficiency due to conformance problems, such as gravity override, viscous fingering and channelling. Foam, composed of gas bubbles separated by continuous liquid films (lamellae), can effectively mitigate these problems. During foam flooding, the mobility of gas is reduced by a factor of hundreds or even more (Tang and...
Magnetic resonance presents an array of unparalleled opportunities in probing fluids in porous media. Magnetic resonance methods are nowadays routinely employed in well-logging, monitoring underground water resources, laboratory analysis, and industrial process and quality control. Despite these widespread applications, there are significant problems associated with the inability of...
Moisture management in textiles is not only of importance for functional clothing, but also for medical fabrics. Understanding or even predicting the dynamics of spontaneous imbibition in textiles is challenging due to the heterogeneity of textile structures and thus the complexity of the fiber/water/air interfaces. The physics on the pore scale determine the macroscopic water transport....
There are numerous challenges associated with measuring the wettability of a porous material. Surface roughness and chemical heterogeneity obscure representative characterisations via contact angle hysteresis. Micron-resolution X-ray CT imaging has enabled direct geometric measurements of contact angle inside core samples but due to uncertainty and error at the contact line, this method tends...
Though X-ray microcomputed tomography (μ-CT) is an established and versatile tool to determine the 3D microstructure of porous materials, it is still a major challenge to capture the degree of disorder and to determine the extent of heterogeneity in membrane-like materials [1,2]. Membranes, such as paper sheets, possess enormous aspect ratios. The formation of paper sheets yields a complex...
Shales are sedimentary rocks with a complex mineralogy, where the mechanical properties are predominantly determined by the orientation of clay minerals[1]. Shales are increasingly studied, due to their use as cap rocks in carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. Attenuation-contrast computed tomography (CT) allows three-dimensional (3D) imaging of the microscale morphology, also...
This work aims to automatically detect the location of cracks formation during uniaxial compaction experiment of grain assemblies using a robust and novel Digital Volume Correlation (DVC) approach. Experiments, such as absorption or compression, can lead to abrupt structural modifications of the material (e.g., swelling, tears or cracks), that demand robust algorithms to be detected and...
Computed micro-tomography (µCT) is a valuable tool to study transport phenomena in the 3D pore network of geomaterials. Recent advances, mainly at synchrotron beam lines but also using lab scanners, have made it possible to perform time-resolved µCT, imaging changes in the sample over time, with time resolutions on the order of seconds. In such cases, a 4D reconstruction is computed from a...
Battery performance is strongly correlated with electrode microstructural properties. To account for its impact, lithium-ion battery (LIB) models either abstract the microstructural heterogeneity of composite electrodes using effective macroscopic properties (macro- or meso- scale models) or directly solve the system of equations on the microstructure geometry or mesh (microstructure-scale...
In recent years, watershed-based methods mimicking basin flooding have been adopted for the partitioning the pore space in 2D and 3D images into pores regions as a basis for pore network modelling. However, due to the noisy nature of tomographic images and the neglection of both the convergent and divergent features in different locations in the pore space, watershed-based partitioning...
Image segmentation remains the most critical step in Digital Rock Physics (DRP) workflows, affecting modelling results and the analysis of physical rock properties. Conventional segmentation techniques struggle with numerous image artefacts and user bias, which lead to considerable uncertainty. This study evaluates the advantages of the machine learning algorithm of the Ilastik code to DRP...
