Mid-infrared optical tomography for imaging through petroleum: A feasibility study

The feasibility of generating tomographic images of objects inside crude oil is investigated in this paper. Crude oil in the visible spectrum usually appears as black oil. Nevertheless, in the mid-infrared range, crude oil presents bands of high transmission. These windows of opportunities are explored to obtain data for generating cross-section images. In this paper, a first generation tomograph (containing one radiation source and one detector) is setup and applied to visualize objects inside a typical crude oil sample from a Brazilian reservoir. Reconstructed images based on standard filtered back-projection algorithm for phantom measurements show very promising results.