Electrokinetic phenomena are induced by the relative motion between a fluid and a solid surface and are directly related to the existence of an electric double layer between the fluid and the solid grain surface. Electrokinetics in porous media plays an important role in geophysical applications and environmental applications. | VNU Journal of Science: Mathematics – Physics, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2016) 22-33 Laboratory Measurement of Microstructure Parameters of Porous Rocks Luong Duy Thanh1,*, Rudolf Sprik2 1 2 Water Resources University, 175 Tay Son, Dong Da, Ha Noi, Vietnam Van der Waals-Zeeman Institute, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Received 24 April 2016 Revised 24 May 2016; Accepted 24 June 2016 Abstract: Electrokinetic phenomena are induced by the relative motion between a fluid and a solid surface and are directly related to the existence of an electric double layer between the fluid and the solid grain surface. Electrokinetics in porous media plays an important role in geophysical applications and environmental applications. Electrokinetic phenomena depend not only on fluid but also on microstructure parameters of porous media. In order to study the dependence of electrokinetics on microstructure parameters, we have measured the microstructure parameters as well as elastic moduli of 21 porous rock samples including natural rocks and artificial rocks. The experimental results are in good agreement with literature. The results show that there is a big difference in measured parameters between the natural rocks and artificial ones. Namely, the formation factors, the Poisson’s ratio of natural rocks are normally higher than those of artificial rocks. However, the porosity, the solid density and the permeability of the natural rocks are smaller than those of the artificial samples. The bulk modulus is normally higher that shear modulus for all samples. Based on the measured parameters, we will study the dependence of electrokinetic coupling coefficient on microstructure parameters of the porous media (in the upcoming paper). Keywords: Electrokinetics, streaming potential, microstructure parameters, porous media, rocks 1. Introduction∗ The electrokinetic phenomena are induced by the relative motion between the fluid and the solid surface. In a porous medium such as rocks or .
