Lead Chief Investigator

Mark A Knackstedt Applied Maths, RSPhysE, ANU

Project Title

Digital Rock Program Petrophysical Properties of Rock from 3D images

Brief Description for General Publications

This project involves the direct computation of physical properties of complex rocks from images acquired at the ANU's microtomography facility, which now possesses two beamlines and a unique helical scanning capability . The properties of interest are those needed for the petrophysical characterisation of a rock core: permeability (single and multi-phase), conductivity/resistivity, elasticity and NMR response. It is extremely expensive and time consuming to obtain much of this data from experimental means; in addition, the experiments can be unreliable, and it is nearly impossible to determine whether an unexpected data point is the result of an experiment gone wrong. In a number of important publications, we have demonstrated the predictive power of microtomography and computation for simple rock types. It is now the goal to extend this predictive capacity to more complex rock types, thus laying the foundations for a "virtual core laboratory". Using data and rock samples provided by the 11 companies companies that are part of the Digital Core Consortium, we will conduct an extensive program of comparison between experiment and computation.