Advances in Computed Tomography for Geomaterials: GeoX 2010

Foreword

Geomaterials are often the fundamental building blocks of infrastructure. They are the soil, sediment and rock upon which manufactured geomaterials, such as asphalt, composites and concrete are laid or poured. Geomaterials are also a fundamental foundation of modern society, providing energy through coal, gas, oil, etc. Working with these materials provides interesting, complex and difficult challenges, such as modification, construction, maintenance and repair of the building blocks as along with extraction of energy and sequestration of carbon dioxide. In this book, numerous techniques are presented to address issues that stem from the use and evaluation of geomaterials with computed tomography (CT) imagery.

CT imagery provides a basis by which many complex structures/feature within geomaterials can be visualized and evaluated. CT sections the scanned material into small parts and then reconstructs these parts into three-dimensional images. This process has seen widespread used in medical fields and has grown increasingly common in diagnosing ailments in humans. At the same time, CT has been applied to geomaterials, which are being studied for industrial and research purposes.

In this book, advances in CT are presented that are built upon petroleum research conducted in the late 1980s and was first addressed by a collective international group of researchers at GeoX2003 workshop (Japan) and then again addressed by a international effort at GeoX2006 (Aussois, France). ...