The following are some videos showing flooding experiments done at the University of New Brunswick’s MRI Research Centre, using the ImaCore 3017 3D MRI Imaging system.
Horizontal Flooding – 2D Slices from a 3D Fast Spin Echo Pulse (FSE) sequence.
This flood shows significant oil bypassed by water flooding. Local image intensity is directly proportional to oil saturation. The images took 13min each, for a total measure time of 6.5 hours. The initial oil saturation was 0.99, while residual oil saturation was 0.31 and oil recovery was 68%.
Vertical Flooding – 2D Slices from a 3D Fast Spin Echo Pulse (FSE) sequence
This flood shows a piston-like flooding front. Local image intensity is directly proportional to oil saturation. The images took 13min each, for a total measure time of 6.5 hours. The initial oil saturation was 0.99, while residual oil saturation was 0.24 and oil recovery was 75%.
Water Flooding of a Model Oil System
This flood shows a imaging of Fluorine-19 using 3D fast spin echo (FSE) images to yield oil saturation directly. Changing from hydrogen to fluorine nuclei done my changing the magnet field to 1.6T giving MRI frequency of 63.5 MHz for Fluorine-19 (no change in RF probe thus leaving the sample intact). Fluorine-19 Fluorolube oil imaging on a Bentheimer core plug, 11 minutes per image for 3.6 hours total measuring time.
Flood at 3T
The following video shows a flood preformed at 3T in the ImaCore MRI Imaging system. It shows a flood of a Berea sandstone saturated with 2% KCl brine as D2O sweeps through it. Because D2O is NMR invisible, the observed signal is reduced as D2O replaces the water in the rock. Each frame in the movie was created from three dimensional images recorded on an ImaCore system at 1.5 T with a 1.5 ms tau employing the three dimensional fast spin echo pulse sequence. For each image, a fraction of a pore volume of D2O was injected into the rock, the flood was paused and the three dimensional image acquired. The three dimensional image for each frame took approximately 35 seconds to acquire. The movie was then created by stitching the twenty-six three dimensional images together. Because each image is three dimensional, the data can also be rotated so that the flood can be observed from any angle. In addition, the three dimensional data can be sliced on any plane so that the a planar view of what is going on within the rock can also be witnessed.
For more information about the ImaCore system and the types of information that can be acquired, please contact us.