Numerical modeling of the role of water and clay content in soils' and rocks' bulk electrical conductivity

Abstract

The influence of clay and water content in the electrical conductivity of rocks and soils has been experimentally established and is expressed by simple empirical laws: the Archie's law and the addition law between volume water conductivity and surface shale conductivity. Two independent numerical modeling techniques, the moment method and the finite difference method, are presented here and are used, first, to verify the agreement between Maxwell's equation based theoretical approaches and the empirical laws and, second, to begin to investigate for a possible effect of the microscopic geometry over macroscopic conductivity. A good agreement between simulation results and Archie's law is obtained when both randomly distributed isotropic and elongated microvolumes of conducting water are considered and a slight difference appears between these two microstructures. For low clay contents in clay‐dispersed media, the clay‐associated conductivity is shown to be proportional to a specific clay area, which is in good agreement with the addition empirical law.