Irreducible water saturation, affecting
the productivity of a reservoir,
is one of the key parameters for a tight sandstone reservoir. Nuclear
magnetic resonance (NMR) logging, detecting the relaxation information
on pore fluid with hydrogen nuclei in formation, can be used to distinguish
irreducible and movable fluids as a result of their different relaxation
information. The irreducible water saturation can be determined by
the T
2 cutoff method in the conventional
reservoir. However, a tight sandstone reservoir possesses a complex
pore structure, and relaxation signals of different pore fluids may
overlap in the T
2 distribution. The T
2 cutoff method to determine irreducible water
saturation may be a challenge in tight sandstone reservoirs. In this
study, a novel T
2-distribution-based method,
with the film model assumption, was proposed to determine the irreducible
water saturation in tight sandstone reservoirs. The T
2 distribution was transformed by a continuous wavelet
transform to obtain the two-dimensional matrix of wavelet coefficients,
and the position and shape parameters of the spectral peak at different
scales in wavelet space were determined. These parameters were used
to construct the Gaussian distribution functions (GDFs) at different
scales. The T
2 distribution was decomposed
on the basis of the constructed GDFs, and then the optimal decomposition
was selected. The irreducible water saturation is determined by the
optimal T
2 distribution decomposed. The
effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method were validated
by numerical simulation, core experimental, and NMR logging data processing.