Laboratory NMR Study to Quantify the Water Saturation of Partially Saturated Porous Rocks

Abstract

The low-field nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technique is widely used as a noninvasive method to characterize the water content of subsurface porous media, such as aquifers and hydrocarbon reservoirs, but the quantitative correlation between the water saturation and the NMR relaxation signal has not been fully addressed. We conducted a laboratory study to measure the NMR signals of sandstone samples with different water saturations and to develop an empirical model for estimating the water saturation. The partially saturatinthe irreducible water saturationg states were derived by a high-speed centrifuge. The result shows that the water saturation is proportional to the geometric mean of the transverse relaxation time and can be fitted through a power function. Moreover, it has been found that the fitting parameters vary with the porosity and exhibit similar behaviors with the parameters of the classical Archie equation. The water saturation as well as its mobility state can be estimated with the NMR signals and porosity data. The proposed method has the potential to be applied to detect and quantify the water content in vadose zones, phreatic aquifers, permafrost regions, and gas hydrate reservoirs.