Study on Mechanism of Two-phase Flow in Porous Media Using Micro Focused X-ray CT

A technology of X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) has become one of the popular techniques in the medical and engineering fields as a non-destructive testing method. In general, there are three kinds of X-ray CT scanners for medical, industrial and micro focused applications. In particular, micro focused X-ray CT (MXCT) scanners with high energy x-ray beam attaining high resolution have been drastically developed in a decade. Meanwhile, the study with respect to multi-phase flow in porous media desires to get more quantitative parameters of the particle shape and pore structure to clarify the mechanism, such as residual oil trapping. Nowadays, techniques of image processing and analyzing are very developed worldwide so that it has been available to evaluate pore structure and the fluid behavior without any destruction. The objective of this study is to understand residual mechanism of oil in sandy soil during water flooding. In this paper, a newly developed apparatus of flow injection for MXCT scanner and image analyzing technique were introduced and then, the pore scale and its distribution in the specimen were evaluated as the achievement of the first objective. Additionally, the cluster analysis was applied to each trapped oil blobs extracted from MXCT images. This image processing technique allowed quantitative evaluation to pore structure of specimen and trapped oil blobs.