| Abstract | Berea sandstone is the building block for reservoirs containing precious hydrocarbon fuel. In this study, we comprehensively reveal the microstructure of Berea sandstone, which is often treated as a porous material with interconnected micro-pores of 2. -5μm. This has been possible due to the combined application of micro-computed tomography (CT) and focused ion beam (FIB)-scanning electron microscopy (SEM) on a Berea sample. While the use of micro-CT images are common for geological materials, the clubbing and comparison of tomography on Berea with state-of-the-art microstructure imaging techniques like FIB-SEM reveals some unforeseen features of Berea microstructure. In particular, for the first time FIB-SEM has been used to understand the micro-structure of reservoir rock material like Berea sandstone. By using these characterization tools, we are able to show that the micro-pores (less than 30μm) are absent below the solid material matrix, and that it has small interconnected pores (30-40μm) and large crater-like voids (100-250μm) throughout the bulk material. Three-dimensional pore space reconstructions have been prepared from the CT images. Accordingly, characterization of Berea sandstone specimen is performed by calculation of pore-structure volumes and determination of porosity values. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. |
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