Multi-scale rock surface area quantification—a systematic method to evaluate the reactive surface area of rocks

Abstract

An integration of methods to quantify the surface area of porous solid materials with a broad span of spatial resolution is presented. The application of it is to detect and quantify the rock surface area modifications caused by fluid–rock interactions on different scales from several nanometres to metres. The new approach is to study the fluid-accessible surface area of rock fragments during dissolution processes.In this paper, diverse methods for surface quantification at different levels of surface detail were adapted for the application of rock surface quantification and porosimetry measurements. The geometric external surface area of rock fragments can be determined by paraffin wax coating and, in special cases, by parallelepiped surface estimations. This geometrical surface area of rock polyhedrons is equal to the macroscopic bounding surface area of a rock volume. Representative surface details on the scale of micrometres to millimetres on geometrical surface area can be quantified by mechanical roughness analyses. The resultant roughness factors are compared to optical roughness quantifications by confocal laser scanning microscopy and white light interferometry and can indicate modifications of the pore space up to several hundred nanometres. The comparison of rock pore space data, measured by both mercury intrusion porosimetry and nitrogen adsorption, quantifies the surface area of pores with a diameter of approximately 2nm.These various surface data at different levels of detail were integrated to get an estimation of this surface area, which affects fluid–rock interactions. The proposed concept has the potential to trace the multi-scale rock surface area evolution in response to fluid–rock interaction processes.The importance of this concept is its application beyond the laboratory survey. For example, additionally to their specific surface area, the reactive surface area of rock particles in a mining dump is controlled by geometrical size and surface roughness of particles.