Moving across scales: a quantitative assessment of X-ray CT to measure the porosity of rocks

We apply multidimensional X-ray CT to quantify the porosity of Berea Sandstone by using both medical- and synchrotron-based X-ray radiation, so as to produce images of the same sample with mm- and micron-resolution, respectively. Three different samples are used and the obtained tomograms are compared by considering the spatial distribution of porosity values for the range of voxel sizes 0.25–16 mm3. The agreement between the two independent techniques is assessed by means of the concordance correlation coefficient. Statistically significant correlations are found for each sample up to the maximum resolution of the medical CT scanner, i.e. for images with a voxel size of $$(0.5 \times 0.5 \times 1\,\hbox {mm})³$$ . The direct comparison of images obtained by medical- and synchrotron-based X-ray radiation has a dual benefit. First, it objectively informs the segmentation step required for the binarization of the high-resolution synchrotron images that is otherwise prone to operator bias; in this context, the applicability of the proposed workflow is demonstrated with two widely applied locally adaptive thresholding algorithms, namely the hysteresis and the watershed methods. Secondly, once this calibration has occurred, the coupling of the two techniques allows analyzing porosity heterogeneity across a range of length-scales that spans over more than eight orders of magnitude. We anticipate that the ability to perform a true multi-scale experiment may represent the required point of departure for developing up-scaling approaches that capture the inherently complex heterogeneity of rocks.