Fast Tracking of Fluid Invasion Using Time-Resolved Neutron Tomography

Water flow in a sandstone sample is studied during an experiment in situ in a neutron tomography setup. In this paper, a projection-based methodology for fast tracking of the imbibition front in 3D is presented. The procedure exploits each individual neutron 2D radiograph, instead of the tomographic-reconstructed images, to identify the 4D (space and time) saturation field, offering a much higher time resolution than more standard reconstruction-based methods. Based on strong space and time regularizations of the fluid flow, with an a priori defined space and time shape functions, the front shape is identified at each projection time step. This procedure aiming at a fast tracking the fluid advance is explored through two examples. The first one shows that the fluid motion that occurs during one single 180 scan can be resolved at 5 Hz with a sub-pixel accuracy whereas it cannot be unraveled with plain tomographic reconstruction. The second example is composed of 42 radiographs acquired all along a complete fluid invasion in the sample. This experiment uses the very same approach with the additional difficulty of large fluid displacement in between two projections. As compared to the classical approach based on full reconstructions at each invasion stage, the proposed methodology in the studied examples is roughly 300 times faster offering an enhanced time resolution.