The Study of Porous Media Reconstruction Using a 2D Micro-CT Image and MPS

A new method named multiple-point geostatistics (MPS) which originated from geoscience allows extracting the characteristics and structures from training images and anchoring them to the simulated regions. The 3D reconstruction of porous media is quite significant to the study of mechanisms of fluid flow in porous media. Therefore, a method using a real 2D micro-CT image and MPS to reconstruct the 3D structures of porous media is proposed. A cross-section of porous media, with the resolution of 10 microns, obtained by micro-CT scanning is used as an original training image. By using MPS and extracted sample points from each former regenerated training image, each newly reconstructed image is taken as a new training image to reconstruct its next layer. Then, the stochastic 3D images of porous media are generated by stacking all the reconstructed layers successively. The permeabilities of the reconstructed images and the target image composed of real sandstone volume data were computed by using lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for comparison. The experimental results show that although the structures of porous media reconstructed through this method are stochastic, all the reconstructed results have the similar structures, which are close to those of real volume data obtained by micro-CT scanning, demonstrating better reconstructed results than what two-point geostatistics does.