Abstract
In this article are presented the results obtained for the determination of mineral composition and petrophysical properties of eight sedimentary rock samples through a proposed new method, which is supported by X-ray microtomography image analysis (microCT). The results are compared with their corresponding ones obtained by traditional techniques in order to assess the efficiency of the new method. Three samples of carbonate rocks and five of sandstone were used in this study. Two sandstone samples come from the Rio do Peixe basin (BRP, at northeastern Brazil) while the rest were extracted from USA basins. The best results were obtained in the quantification of the mineral composition of the rocks and, consequently, in the estimation of grain density. Due to its insufficient image resolution, the microtomography was sometimes unable to quantify very small pores, giving low porosity values. The correlation between bulk densities measured by the two methods shows an intermediate efficiency. Although the results presented here indicate that the microCT image analysis is appropriate for quantification of mineral phases, this technique has potential for determination of many other physical properties, such as mechanical, electrical and fluid flow rock properties.
Highlights
Determining the mineral composition of rocks is important because this controls the majority of physical and chemical properties of the lithotypes, determining the own recognition of that rock and affecting every stage of your economic exploitation, as the mining method and mineral processing strategies
For both BRP sandstone samples the phase recognized by X-ray diffraction (XRD) as “clay + mica” seems it was recognized by microCT as feldspar
This work demonstrates the efficiency of the method for determination of mineral composition and petrophysical properties of carbonate and sandstone rocks through X-ray microtomography digital image analysis
Summary
Determining the mineral composition of rocks is important because this controls the majority of physical and chemical properties of the lithotypes, determining the own recognition of that rock and affecting every stage of your economic exploitation, as the mining method and mineral processing strategies. Several techniques are conventionally applied for recognition and quantification of minerals, especially the X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray fluorescence (XRF), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive microscopy (EDS) (Chalmers et al, 2012; Kubala-Kukus et al, 2015; Dias et al, 2017). Each of these techniques has advantages and limitations, and none of them presents final results to any situation, but they are complimentary. Several authors have presented many applications for the rock digital models generated from microCT data (Schmitt et al, 2015; Archilla et al, 2016; Soares et al, 2018; Oliveira & Soares, 2018)
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