From fines migration to filter cake formation and back again

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Formation damage is an expensive issue when it comes to drilling boreholes. Drilling fluids can make up to 15% of total expenditure when drilling one, so keeping fluid loss to the formation is essential. This is done by creating a filter cake (from the particles suspended in the drilling fluid) on the borehole-reservoir interface. If the particles are chosen poorly then can result in significantly reducing the productivity of the reservoir formation. Understanding how these particles interact with porous media is critical to understanding how filter cakes form and preventing financial loses. I will primarily be using 4D X-ray tomography track fluid suspended particles and observe how they interact with reservoir rocks and reservoir rock analogues. I currently wish to take a high-quality scan of sandstone and use this data to both 3D print a copy of the rock, and to run computational flow dynamics (CFD) analysis on. Once the sample has been 3D printed, I can then run 4D x-ray CT flow tests on it and the original rock and compare to each other and the results of the CFD analysis. Other techniques I would like to utilise include Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) to track the particles in 2D which will also be used for comparison.