Under-sampling and compressed sensing of 3D spatially-resolved displacement propagators in porous media using APGSTE-RARE MRI.

A method for under-sampling and compressed sensing of 3D spatially-resolved propagators is presented and demonstrated for flow in a packed bed and a heterogeneous carbonate rock. By sampling only 12.5% of q,k-space, the experimental acquisition time was reduced by almost an order of magnitude. In particular, for both systems studied, a 3D image was acquired at 1 mm isotropic spatial resolution such that 134,400 local propagators were obtained. Data were acquired in ~1 h and ~11 h for the packed bed and rock, respectively. It is shown that spatial resolution and under-sampling using this implementation retains the quantitative nature of the propagator measurement, and differences between implementation of this measurement in two and three dimensions are identified. The potential for 3D spatially-resolved propagators to provide new insights into transport processes in porous media by characterisation of the statistical moments of the propagators is discussed.

Fast spatially-resolved T2 measurements with constant-gradient CPMG.

Speed of acquisition is paramount for the application of magnetic resonance to flow experiments through porous rocks. One popular method for imaging core floods is the spatially resolved T2 experiment which can separate fluids either by their viscosity contrast or by doping one fluid with a relaxation agent. Existing techniques for spatial-T2 may suffer from long acquisition times and eddy currents due to the pulsing of magnetic field gradients. Here, we propose a constant gradient method for 1d spatially-resolved T2 which embraces the speed of frequency encoding techniques and avoids eddy currents by the absence of any gradient ramps during the radio frequency (r.f.) pulse train. We provide the operating envelope for this kind of experiment, which is restricted due to the slice selectivity of the r.f. pulses in the presence of the magnetic field gradient. Additionally, we show that the effects of self-diffusion and the mixing of T1 and T2 contributions are manageable. As an illustration, we have applied this technique to an enhanced oil recovery experiment. The two fluid phases were tracked without any doping and with a time resolution of 40 s. In this case, the increased time resolution allowed us to observe dynamic flow phenomena such as fluid fingering and the calculation of the velocity of the fluid displacement fronts.

Acquisition of spatially-resolved displacement propagators using compressed sensing APGSTE-RARE MRI.

A method is presented for accelerating the acquisition of spatially-resolved displacement propagators via under-sampling of an Alternating Pulsed Gradient Stimulated Echo - Rapid Acquisition with Relaxation Enhancement (APGSTE-RARE) data acquisition with compressed sensing image reconstruction. The method was demonstrated with respect to the acquisition of 2D spatially-resolved displacement propagators of water flowing through a packed bed of hollow cylinders. The q,k-space was under-sampled according to variable-density pseudo-random sampling patterns. The quality of compressed sensing reconstructions of spatially-resolved propagators at a range of sampling fractions was assessed using the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) as a quality metric. Propagators of good quality (PSNR 33.2 dB) were reconstructed from only 6.25% of all data points in q,k-space, resulting in a reduction in the data acquisition time from 4 h to 14 min. The spatially-resolved propagators were reconstructed using both the total variation and nuclear norm sparsifying transforms; use of total variation resulted in a slightly higher quality of the reconstructed image in most cases. To illustrate the power of this method to characterise heterogeneous flow in porous media, the method is applied to the characterisation of flow in a vuggy carbonate rock.