Development and validation of an acoustic-electrical joint testing system for hydrate-bearing porous media

Abstract

Acoustic and electrical properties are fundamental and important physical properties to characterize hydrate-bearing sediments. A new experimental system called Ultrasound Combined with Electrical Impedance was developed for jointly testing the ultrasonic wave parameters and electrical impedance of hydrate-bearing porous media in the hydrate formation and decomposition processes. The Ultrasound Combined with Electrical Impedance system features its novel ultrasonic-electrical compound sensors and sensor array, fully controllable instruments, variety of sampled data, and flexible working modes. Experiment was carried out with methane gas as the hydrate former, meanwhile the acoustic/electrical parameters were derived. The acoustic/electrical properties were characterized with the aid of typical models such as the time-average equation, Wood’s equation, weighted equation, and Archie’s formula. It has been shown by the results that key parameters such as the sound velocity and electrical impedance can be used to characterize the acoustic and electrical properties of hydrate-bearing sediments conjointly, demonstrating the applicability of the proposed Ultrasound Combined with Electrical Impedance system. The wavelet-analysis based denoising approach and singularity detection method are effective denoising methods to filter the ultrasound signals and to identify the arriving time of the ultrasonic wave. The weighted equation and Archie’s formula with a segmented regression method are recommended for modeling the relations between the hydrate saturation and sound velocity/impedance modulus, respectively.