A comparative study of micro-CT and mercury intrusion techniques for predicting permeability and surface area evolution during chemical dissolution

Abstract

In this paper, we report on experimental and computational studies investigating the evolution of pore structure and permeability of a microporous carbonate rock during chemical dissolution using information provided from X-ray micro-computed tomography (µ-CT) and mercury intrusion porosimetry (MIP) techniques. We consider a chemical dissolution in a core sample by a nonacidic solution wherein a quasi-uniform modification of pore structure occurred. First, we conduct a comparative analysis on the capabilities and limitations of the µ-CT and MIP methods to quantify the evolution of pore size and pore surface area. In particular, we incorporate micropores into the calculations of the pore size-related parameters to highlight the uncertainties that ignoring microporosity causes. In the second part of the paper, we present predictive results on the fractional changes in the permeability of the rock using the Katz-Thompson (KT) and Kozeny-Carman (KC) models. The predictions are based on two characteristic parameters of the pore phase, i.e., the critical pore diameter and the specific pore surface area, and two characteristic macro-scale properties, i.e., porosity and formation factor, all calculated from both the MIP and µ-CT methods. The predicted changes in permeability are compared with those calculated directly on the images using the lattice-Boltzmann (LB) flow simulation on segmented images. The effect of changes in microporosity is also assessed to investigate its role in permeability evolution. The results showed that the KT model could reasonably predict the fractional changes in permeability in terms of the pore structure and macroscale parameters calculated from the MIP and µ-CT methods.