Spectral‐induced polarization measurements on sieved sands and the relationship to permeability

Abstract

Laboratory measurements of the permeability and spectral-induced polarization (SIP) response of samples consisting of unconsolidated sands typical of those found in New Zealand aquifers have been made. After correction of measured formation factors to allow for the fact that some were measured at only one fluid conductivity, predictions of permeability from the grain size (d) of the samples are found to agree well with measured values of permeability. The Cole-Cole time constant (derived from the SIP measurements) is found, as expected, to depend upon d 2 , but can be affected by the inclusion of smaller grains in the sample. Measurements made on samples comprising of mixtures of grain sizes show that inclusion in a sample of even 10% of smaller grains can significantly reduce both the Cole-Cole time constant (s CC ) and the permeability, and support theoretical derivation of how the permeability of a mixture of grain sizes varies with the content of the mixture. Proposed relationships for using s CC as a predictor for permeability are tested and found to be crucially dependent on the assumed relationship between the dynamic pore radius and grain size. The inclusion of a multiplicative constant to take account of numerical approximations results in good predictions for the permeability of the samples in this study. It seems unlikely, however, that there is a single global expression for predicting permeability from SIP data for all samples.

Full‐waveform inversion of complex resistivity IP spectra: Sensitivity analysis and inversion tests using local and global optimization strategies on synthetic datasets

“…; Dahlin, Rosqvist and Leroux ; Leroux, Dahlin and Rosqvist ; Reynolds ; Gurin et al . ; Joseph, Ingham and Gouws ). The IP method is mainly aimed at determining the polarizability of the subsurface by exploiting its dispersive response to the application of a time‐varying electric field.…”

“…hydrogeophysics (examples can be found, among others, in Dahlin, Leroux and Nissen 2002;Sogade et al 2006;Hördt et al 2007;Reynolds 2011;Gurin et al 2013;Joseph, Ingham and Gouws 2016). The IP method is mainly aimed at determining the polarizability of the subsurface by exploiting its dispersive response to the application of a timevarying electric field.…”

Relationship Between Induced Polarization Relaxation Time and Hydraulic Characteristics of Water-Bearing Sand

“…Previous studies have shown that permeability calculations can be carried out by using the correlation between relaxation time and pore size, and the calculated results are in good agreement with the directly measured permeability (Niu et al, 2016). However, some scholars have proposed that the permeability calculation method based on the relationship between relaxation time and pore size has certain limitations, and it is difficult to obtain a universally applicable prediction model for mixed particle size samples (Joseph et al, 2016;Kruschwitzv et al, 2010;Titov et al, 2010). The relaxation time spectrum inversion method is to obtain the excitation polarization relaxation time distribution of the sample from the time-domain attenuation curve, and use the excitation polarization relaxation time spectrum to characterize the pore structure distribution and estimate the permeability (Tong et al, 2006a;Tong et al, 2006b;Titov et al, 2010).…”

3D geostatistical inversion of induced polarization data and its application to coal seam fires

“…Nowadays, the range of induced polarization applications has remarkably broadened and covers, for instance, the tracking of contaminants plumes (Barker, 1990;Kemna et al, 2004;Sogade et al, 2006), landfill mapping (Leroux et al, 2010;Dahlin and Leroux, 2012;Gazoty et al, 2012), oil and gas exploration (Spies, 1983;Carlson and Zonge, 1996), monitoring of damage in porous rocks (Cosenza et al, 2016), and permeability characterization (Attwa and Günther, 2013;Revil et al, 2015b;Joseph et al, 2016) just to cite a few examples. This is a consequence of the huge progress that has been made in terms of induced-polarization instrumentation (Kingman et al, 2007;Zimmermann et al, 2008;Xi et al, 2014) and processing as well as the inversion of the full waveform data (Olsson et al, 2016).…”