New SFB 1313 and SimTech publication, published in "Scientific Reports". The work has been developed within the SFB 1313 research projects B05, C04,C05, and Z02 .
Authors
- Dongwon Lee (University of Stuttgart, SFB 1313 research project B05)
- Felix Weingardt (University of Stuttgart, SFB 1313 research project B05)
- Johannes Hommel (University of Stuttgart, SFB 1313 associated research project CX2)
- Joseph Piotrowski (University of Stuttgart, former SFB 1313 doctoral researcher, research project C05)
- Holger Class (University of Stuttgart, SFB 1313 research project C04)
- Holger Steeb (University of Stuttgart, SFB 1313 research project B05, C05, and Z02)
Abstract
Many subsurface engineering technologies or natural processes cause porous medium properties, such as porosity or permeability, to evolve in time. Studying and understanding such processes on the pore scale is strongly aided by visualizing the details of geometric and morphological changes in the pores. For realistic 3D porous media, X-Ray Computed Tomography (XRCT) is the method of choice for visualization. However, the necessary high spatial resolution requires either access to limited high-energy synchrotron facilities or data acquisition times which are considerably longer (e.g. hours) than the time scales of the processes causing the pore geometry change (e.g. minutes). Thus, so far, conventional benchtop XRCT technologies are often too slow to allow for studying dynamic processes. Interrupting experiments for performing XRCT scans is also in many instances no viable approach. We propose a novel workflow for investigating dynamic precipitation processes in porous media systems in 3D using a conventional XRCT technology. Our workflow is based on limiting the data acquisition time by reducing the number of projections and enhancing the lower-quality reconstructed images using machine-learning algorithms trained on images reconstructed from high-quality initial- and final-stage scans. We apply the proposed workflow to induced carbonate precipitation within a porous-media sample of sintered glass-beads. So we were able to increase the temporal resolution sufficiently to study the temporal evolution of the precipitate accumulation using an available benchtop XRCT device.