ABSTRACT
In recent two years, petroleum engineering is introducing 3-D printing technology as a new tool to facilitate the replicability in physical modeling experiments. Though remains in early age, the developing of 3-D printed rocks attracted significant attentions and broad interests. Regarding the geomechanical and petrophysics properties, the parameter we mostly pay attention to is porosity. With a 3-D printer with the resolution of 0.2 mm, this study manufactured a standard cylinder sample of 3-D printed gypsum rock and firstly measured the porosity of 3-D printed gypsum rock sample by the laboratory methods—Helium Porosimeter (HP) and Mercury Injection Porosimetry (MIP), whose result is 28.86% and 27.90%, respectively. Then the sample was scanned by SkyScan 2211 Multiscale CT. With the help of the professional CT analysis software, the 3-D digital images can be viewed and filtered to remove the noise and smooth the shapes. Following the threshold determination and segmentation by different algorithms, the data processing requires a complicated procedure. The result shows that the porosity of micro-CT data of 3-D printed gypsum rock is 32.66% using the watershed algorithm in segmentation, which is comparable to the laboratory measurement result.
