Greetings dear community,
It yas been quite a while since I have come to ask for your guidance.
Here's today's question:
What method do you use to estimate, or compute organic porosity?
Are there any good papers talking about this subject?
Personally, I teamed up with my colleague to get some SEM pictures of some source rock samples cut vertically to the bedding.
We then used two approaches (both with image analysis using photoshop's pixel count):
1- we tried estimating the organic porosity on a large section (something like X250 magnification).
2- we estimated the porosity on single kerogen particles ( identifying each particle as amorphous, phytoclast or palynomorphs). And then upscaling this estimation using a precise palynofacies analysis (aom, palyno, phyto ratios with minimum 1000 particles) to get an estimation of organic porosity for whole samples.
Our research is a work in progress, but we observed so far that in our particular SR, the organic porosity is about 3% when translated to the whole sample, and it seems like organic porosity is not entirely correlated to TOC.
I would very much appreciate you advice on this subject. And if you have any references, it would be even better.
Best regards,
Yacine
Porosity calculation from images is a hard task. There are some issues:
1) only ex-situ porosity you can determine. you can interpolate the pores inside the material, but not a recommended one. Solution: you can use gas adsorption techniques to get an estimation.
2) Detecting pores is also challenging. If the pores are irregular than complexity arises. As a solution: I have used Atomic force microscopy images (AFM), where I used height data based images to detect pores.
3) SEM requires vacuum condition to operate. To take image in ambient condition you might take AFM images. I know this is not a big issue, sometimes image taken in ambient condition might provide some extra information.
You can see my paper:@Yacine Mokri
Article An Approach for Quantitative Analysis of Pore Size Distribut...
Dear Mr. Palash,
Thanks a lot for you input, it is inspiring. I will read you article and will come back at you
X-ray computed micro/nanotomography may be useful. Applicability of this method depends on composition of the host rock and sample size.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Linguistics
- Composition Studies
- Publications