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Permeability Hysteresis From Microchannels Opening During Dissolution/Reprecipitation Cycle
Author(s) -
Lesueur Martin,
Poulet Thomas,
Veveakis Manolis
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2020gl088674
Subject(s) - permeability (electromagnetism) , dissolution , porosity , geology , hysteresis , microstructure , porous medium , soil science , materials science , mineralogy , geotechnical engineering , chemical engineering , chemistry , composite material , physics , biochemistry , quantum mechanics , membrane , engineering
Permeability is a critical parameter for geological resources characterization. Its evolution with respect to porosity is particularly interesting and many research initiatives focus on deriving such relationships, to understand some hydraulic impacts of microstructure alteration. Permeability evolution from chemical reactions, for instance, can become complex as flow channels may open during rock dissolution. In this contribution, we show that this phenomenon can lead to irregular porosity‐permeability curves and permeability hysteresis after reprecipitation. Current approaches describing permeability as a simple function of porosity can therefore not capture this behavior, and we advocate instead the use of dynamic modeling for such scenarios. We demonstrate our approach by modeling a dissolution/precipitation cycle for a unit cell pore channel and quantify the process at larger scale on three different rock samples, whose microstructures are reconstructed from segmented micro‐Computerised Tomography scans.