Personal computer-based digital petrophysics

Abstract

In the present work, we describe our experience with digital petrophysics, enhancing our choices for performing the related tasks. The focus is on the use of ordinary personal computers. To our best knowledge, some of the information and hints we give cannot be found in the literature and we hope they may be useful to researchers that intend to work on the development of this new emerging technology. We have used micro-scale X-ray computed tomography to image the rock samples and, in that sense, we address here the issue of the corresponding image acquisition and reconstruction parameters adjustment. In addition, we discuss the imaging resolution selection and illustrate the issue of the representative volume choice with the aid of two examples. The examples corroborate the notion that it is much more challenging to define a representative volume for carbonate samples than for sandstone samples. We also discuss the image segmentation and describe in details the Finite Element computational implementation we developed to perform the numerical simulations for estimating the effective Young modulus from segmented microstructural images. We indicate the respective computational costs and show that our implementation is able to handle comfortably images of 300×300×300 voxels. We use a commercially available Finite Volume software to estimate the effective absolute directional permeability.