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Probing complex geophysical geometries with chattering dust
The modern energy economy and environmental infrastructure rely on the flow of fluids through fractures in rock. Yet this flow cannot be imaged directly because rocks are opaque to most probes. Here we apply chattering dust, or chemically reactive grains of sucrose containing pockets of pressurized...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7572509/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33077790 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19087-z |
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author | Pyrak-Nolte, Laura J. Braverman, William Nolte, Nicholas J. Wright, Alan J. Nolte, David D. |
author_facet | Pyrak-Nolte, Laura J. Braverman, William Nolte, Nicholas J. Wright, Alan J. Nolte, David D. |
author_sort | Pyrak-Nolte, Laura J. |
collection | PubMed |
description | The modern energy economy and environmental infrastructure rely on the flow of fluids through fractures in rock. Yet this flow cannot be imaged directly because rocks are opaque to most probes. Here we apply chattering dust, or chemically reactive grains of sucrose containing pockets of pressurized carbon dioxide, to study rock fractures. As a dust grain dissolves, the pockets burst and emit acoustic signals that are detected by distributed sets of external ultrasonic sensors that track the dust movement through fracture systems. The dust particles travel through locally varying fracture apertures with varying speeds and provide information about internal fracture geometry, flow paths and bottlenecks. Chattering dust particles have an advantage over chemical sensors because they do not need to be collected, and over passive tracers because the chattering dust delineates the transport path. The current laboratory work has potential to scale up to near-borehole applications in the field. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7572509 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-75725092020-10-21 Probing complex geophysical geometries with chattering dust Pyrak-Nolte, Laura J. Braverman, William Nolte, Nicholas J. Wright, Alan J. Nolte, David D. Nat Commun Article The modern energy economy and environmental infrastructure rely on the flow of fluids through fractures in rock. Yet this flow cannot be imaged directly because rocks are opaque to most probes. Here we apply chattering dust, or chemically reactive grains of sucrose containing pockets of pressurized carbon dioxide, to study rock fractures. As a dust grain dissolves, the pockets burst and emit acoustic signals that are detected by distributed sets of external ultrasonic sensors that track the dust movement through fracture systems. The dust particles travel through locally varying fracture apertures with varying speeds and provide information about internal fracture geometry, flow paths and bottlenecks. Chattering dust particles have an advantage over chemical sensors because they do not need to be collected, and over passive tracers because the chattering dust delineates the transport path. The current laboratory work has potential to scale up to near-borehole applications in the field. Nature Publishing Group UK 2020-10-19 /pmc/articles/PMC7572509/ /pubmed/33077790 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19087-z Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Pyrak-Nolte, Laura J. Braverman, William Nolte, Nicholas J. Wright, Alan J. Nolte, David D. Probing complex geophysical geometries with chattering dust |
title | Probing complex geophysical geometries with chattering dust |
title_full | Probing complex geophysical geometries with chattering dust |
title_fullStr | Probing complex geophysical geometries with chattering dust |
title_full_unstemmed | Probing complex geophysical geometries with chattering dust |
title_short | Probing complex geophysical geometries with chattering dust |
title_sort | probing complex geophysical geometries with chattering dust |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7572509/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33077790 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19087-z |
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