Quantitative Properties of Complex Porous Materials Calculated from X-ray μCT Images Adrian P. Sheppard a , Christoph H. Arns a , Arthur Sakellariou a , Tim J. Senden a , Rob M. Sok a , Holger Averdunk a , Mohammad Saadatfar a , Ajay Limaye b and Mark A. Knackstedt a a Department of Applied Mathematics, Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia b VizLab, Supercomputing Facility, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia ABSTRACT A microcomputed tomography (μCT) facility and computational infrastructure developed at the Department of Applied Mathematics at the Australian National University is described. The current experimental facility is capable of acquiring 3D images made up of 2000 3 voxels on porous specimens up to 60 mm diameter with resolutions down to 2 μm. This allows the three-dimensional (3D) pore-space of porous specimens to be imaged over several orders of magnitude. The computational infrastructure includes the establishment of optimised and distributed memory parallel algorithms for image reconstruction, novel phase identification, 3D visualisation, structural characterisation and prediction of mechanical and transport properties directly from digitised tomographic images. To date over 300 porous specimens exhibiting a wide variety of microstructure have been imaged and analysed. In this paper, analysis of a small set of porous rock specimens with structure ranging from unconsolidated sands to complex car- bonates are illustrated. Computations made directly on the digitised tomographic images have been compared to laboratory measurements. The results are in excellent agreement. Additionally, local flow, diffusive and mechanical properties can be numerically derived from solutions of the relevant physical equations on the complex geometries; an experimentally intractable problem. Structural analysis of data sets includes grain and pore partitioning of the images. Local granular partitioning yields over 70,000 grains from a single image. Conventional grain size, shape and connectivity parameters are derived. The 3D organisation of grains can help in correlating grain size, shape and orientation to resultant physical properties. Pore network models generated from 3D images yield over 100000 pores and 200000 throats; comparing the pore structure for the different specimens illustrates the varied topology and geometry observed in porous rocks. This development foreshadows a new numerical laboratory approach to the study of complex porous materials. Keywords: X-ray micro-tomography, porous media, quantitative calculations, transport and mechanical properties, grain partitioning and analysis 1. INTRODUCTION An X-ray microcomputed tomography facility was commissioned to study the effect of morphology and geometry on mechanical and transport properties of real world biological, geological and synthetic materials. Many analytical tools have been developed to probe these relationships, including technologies to visualise, characterise and predict material properties from three-dimensional images of microstructure. In this section, the acquisition hardware, the reconstruction software and the necessary post-processing software are introduced. Further author information: (Send correspondence to M. A. Knackstedt) M. A. Knackstedt: E-mail: mark.knackstedt@anu.edu.au, Telephone: 61 (0)2 6125 3357 A. P. Sheppard: E-mail: adrian.sheppard@anu.edu.au, Telephone: 61 (0)2 6125 8516 C. H. Arns: Email: christoph.arns@anu.edu.au, Telephone: 61 (0)2 6125 5170 Invited Paper Developments in X-Ray Tomography V, edited by Ulrich Bonse, Proc. of SPIE Vol. 6318, 631811, (2006) · 1605-7422/06/$15 · doi: 10.1117/12.679205 Proc. of SPIE Vol. 6318 631811-1 Downloaded From: http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/ on 09/21/2014 Terms of Use: http://spiedl.org/terms