International audienceThe porosity (from values of <1% up to more than 50%, with a mean value of 36.5%) and permeability (from very low values to 20.4 D, with a mean value around 800 mD) of 38 plugs, with a diameter 40 mm, have been measured. These plugs were taken approximately every 1.5 m along a 100 m-long core, sampling a series of reefal carbonate platform lithofacies. A non-unique relationship between porosity and permeability is obtained. In addition, the porosity was measured from processing X-ray micro-tomography images with resolutions ranging from 0.42 to 190.0 µm and sampling volumes ranging from less than 1 µm3 to few cm3. Depending on the structure of the pore network, the computed porosity is, in some cases, controlled by the X-ray image resolution and the sampled volume. While high resolution is required to image micro-porous material, large samples with lower resolution images are necessary for identifying distributed vugs and millimetre-scale structures. This study shows that multi-resolution X-ray micro-tomography is an effective tool for characterizing the multi-scale pore structure of carbonate rocks and understanding how it may control key petrophysical parameters such as porosity and permeability

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Abstract. The aim of this study is to compare the structural, geometrical and transport parameters of a limestone rock sample determined by X-ray microtomography (XMT) images and laboratory experiments. Total and effective porosity, pore-size distribution, tortuosity, and effective diffusion coefficient have been estimated. Sensitivity analyses of the segmentation parameters have been performed. The limestone rock sample studied here has been characterized using both approaches before and after a reactive percolation experiment. Strong dissolution process occurred during the percolation, promoting a wormhole formation. This strong heterogeneity formed after the percolation step allows us to apply our methodology to two different samples and enhance the use of experimental techniques or XMT images depending on the rock heterogeneity. We established that for most of the parameters calculated here, the values obtained by computing XMT images are in agreement with the classical laboratory measurements. We demonstrated that the computational porosity is more informative than the laboratory measurement. We observed that pore-size distributions obtained by XMT images and laboratory experiments are slightly different but complementary. Regarding the effective diffusion coefficient, we concluded that both approaches are valuable and give similar results. Nevertheless, we concluded that computing XMT images to determine transport, geometrical, and petrophysical parameters provide similar results to those measured at the laboratory but with much shorter durations.