Welcome to the PerGeos Use Case Gallery

The task of reliable characterization of complex reservoirs is tightly coupled to studying their microstructure at a variety of scales, which requires a departure from traditional petrophysical approaches and delving into the world of nanoscale. A promising method of representatively retaining a large volume of a rock sample while achieving nanoscale resolution is based on multiscale digital rock technology. The smallest scale of this approach is often realized in the form of working with sev... Read more

Understanding transport mechanisms that govern two-phase flow in fractured porous media has direct implications for natural and industrial processes such as extraction of hydrocarbons from fractured reservoirs, geologic sequestration of CO2, or fluid flow through aquifers.

We present the results of a systematic pore‐scale experimental investigation of two‐phase oil/brine flow through a miniature water‐wet, fractured sandstone core sample. X‐ray microtomography is employed to ge... Read more

Optimization of production from shale reservoirs requires understanding of rock properties over a range of scales.

Multiple imaging techniques can be combined to determine the nature, connectivity, and wettability of nano-scale pore systems as well as the underlying mineralogy and organic textures that control reservoir behavior and the propensity of the matrix to fail and to contain expulsion cracks. The current study demonstrates new capabilities in integrated multiscale and time-res... Read more

This study investigated the influence of compaction on the variation mechanism of petrophysical properties and the relative permeability of unconsolidated sandstone.

Firstly, triaxial mechanical experiments, CT scans, and mercury injection experiments were performed to analyze the microstructural characteristics and the macroscopic mechanism of changes in the petrophysical characteristics under different pressure. Secondly, a modified permeability test approach was adopted on reservoir... Read more

Advances in imaging have made it possible to view nanometer and sub-nanometer structures that are either synthesized or that occur naturally. It is believed that fluid dynamic and thermodynamic behavior differ significantly at these scales from the bulk. From a materials perspective, it is important to be able to create complex structures at the nanometer scale, reproducibly, so that the fluid behavior may be studied. New advances in nanoscale-resolution 3D-printing offer opportunities to ach... Read more

Generating an accurate reservoir model is of critical importance in forecasting the lifespan of hydrocarbon reservoirs and estimating the efficiency of carbon capture and sequestration. One critical parameter controlling the flow of fluids within subsurface reservoirs is the fraction of effective or connected pore spaces in the reservoir. […]

To quantify the connectivity of the pore space, it is therefore necessary to combine high resolution visualization of pore spaces with bulk... Read more

Geomaterials are increasingly being subjected to the quasi-static confinements and dynamic loadings, and thus it is critical to characterise dynamic behaviour under the coupled static-dynamic loading conditions. In this study, a series of dynamic biaxial compression tests was performed on cubic specimens of sandstone by using a triaxial Hopkinson bar system, high-speed three-dimensional digital image correlation (3D-DIC) and synchrotron-based micro-computed-tomography (μCT).

Laboratory Experiments on rock specimens are designed for understanding and characterizing subsurface environment, quantifying potential recovery, and tuning fluid flow models in porous media. The spatial variability and reservoirs’ heterogeneities predicate acquiring expensive cores from different locations. These experiments are mechanically and petrophysically destructive and cannot be repeated or extended on the same core. Replicating core samples with 3D-printing technology innovation ... Read more

Relative permeability and capillary pressure are key properties within special core analysis and provide crucial information for full field simulation models. These properties are traditionally obtained by multi-phase flow experiments, however pore scale modelling has during the last decade shown to add significant information as well as being less time-consuming to obtain. Pore scale modelling has been performed by using the lattice-Boltzmann method directly on the digital rock models obtain... Read more

Up‐scaling the elastic properties of digitized rock volumes as obtained from X‐ray computer tomography (CT) imaging via computer simulations has the potential to assist and complement laboratory measurements.

This computational up‐scaling approach remains a challenging task as the overall elastic properties are not only dependent on the elastic properties of individual grains but also on the hardly resolvable pore spaces between adjacent grains such as micro‐cracks. We develop ... Read more

In this study, we examined the relationship between capillary pressure, saturation, and interfacial area for a three-phase flow system. Using x-ray microtomography we were able to capture high-resolution three-dimensional images of the flow system, from which the saturation, interfacial area, and capillary pressure were determined.

Multi-phase flow in porous media includes many instances of subsurface flow. Three-phase flow in particular is important in situations of enhanced oil recov... Read more

Accurate monitoring of multiphase displacement processes is essential for the development, validation and benchmarking of numerical models used for reservoir simulation and for asset characterization.

Here we demonstrate the first application of a chemically-selective 3D magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique which provides high-temporal resolution, quantitative, spatially resolved information of oil and water saturations during a dynamic imbibition core flood experiment in an Esta... Read more

Coke deposition during crude oil in-situ combustion (ISC) is an important phenomenon that significantly impacts the pore topology and permeability.

In this study, X-ray computed microtomography and a specific image processing procedure were used to reconstruct the micro-tomographic images of packed beds with coke deposition. From the reconstructed images, the microstructural parameters related to the transport were analyzed, such as the effective porosity, the constrictivity and the ge... Read more

With the introduction of the Maps Mineralogy™ software suite, the successor of Qemscan, the technology has evolved, thanks to multiple patents bringing novel methods to acquire mineralogical information from digital rock samples with a modern and user friendly interface.

However, given the hardware technology advances and the emergence of new challenges in reservoir rocks, there is a need to fusion the mineralogical image and the back scattered electron... Read more

We introduce here some techniques to visualize and process large data, mostly targeting the high resolution data acquired by Heliscan microCT.

The data is considered as “large” in the sense that its size exceeds the size of the GPU memory and/or the size of the RAM of the machine.

The following workflow:

• Segmentation
• Porosity / Connected porosity determination
• Pore separation / Pore Size distribution
• Grain size distribution

Imagery produced from FIBSEMs (Dualbeams) provides users with unique data in terms of resolution and sample size that are not available with other techniques. Despite the power of this analytical approach, some limitations in quantifying the textural data restrict the accuracy of data obtained from FIBSEM images.

Segmentation typically consists of a complex workflow involving multiple algorithms at multiple steps. Smart denoising and morphological filters are often included in the segm... Read more

A key benefit to obtaining digital imagery data is the ability to use all parts of the imaged sample for characterization purposes-not just what you have time to explore manually. This is especially the case with large datasets that are created during acquisition of 2D mosaic images or Whole Core CT imagery.

In these cases, a representative area or volume of material has been obtained. The next step will be to extract features, like porosity, for analysis.

But, what else can we ... Read more

Pore-scale two-phase flow modeling is an important technology to study a rock’s relative permeability behavior. To investigate if these models are predictive, the calculated pore-scale fluid distributions which determine the relative permeability need to be validated. In this work, we introduce a methodology to quantitatively compare models to experimental fluid distributions in flow experiments visualized with microcomputed tomography.

First, we analyzed five repeated drainage-i... Read more

The Core Profile Extension, available for PerGeos, provides a powerful toolset for visualization and analysis of whole core CT data. Within this extension the user can load and visualize an entire wells worth of CT data as well as performing detailed analysis of geological and chemical features by utilizing the powerful image analysis library fundamental to PerGeos.

In this example, we illustrate the usefulness of core profile in augmenting traditional core analysis routines and provid... Read more

The Underground Nuclear Explosion Signature Experiment (UNESE) is a multi-laboratory effort to improve U.S. capabilities to detect, locate, identify, and characterize underground nuclear explosions. Here we present a lab-scale experiment developed to test advective gas transport though rock samples at in-situ conditions, and results of tests performed at ambient conditions on rocks collected from the site of a field-scale experiment. Gas transport results are compared to pore and fracture net... Read more

In this study we observe, using pore scale X-ray micro-CT imaging and advanced petrophysical analysis, how surface treated silica nanoparticles improve sweep efficiency of n-octane in drainage corefloods. Specifically, upon injection of n-octane into a brine saturated core, preferential flow paths are observed and attributed to both viscous instability and rock heterogeneity; when the displaced phase contains a modest volume of nanoparticles, the same preferential flow paths are suppressed re... Read more