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Keywords

Berea sandstone, rate-controlled mercury injection, petrophysical characterisation, shape-scale separation, pore-throat radius, capillary pressure

Document Type

Research Article

Abstract

This paper applies the Rate-Controlled-Porosimetry Quantitative Descriptor Framework (RQDF) to four Berea sandstone core plugs. Events were identified using an automated, prominence-based detection algorithm, which was validated against an independently documented manual event count for two of the four plugs. The finding is an empirical shape-scale separation among these four plugs. Descriptors that are invariant by construction under rescaling of the underlying pore-size distributions, namely event-size entropy, distributional and power-law exponents, and curve-region saturation boundaries, reproduce across the four plugs with a coefficient of variation below 8%. Median effective capillary-equivalent pore-throat radius is also stable at this level (CV about 3%), empirically rather than by construction. Descriptors tied to absolute scale, a single extreme event, entry pressure, total event count, and event volume vary by 20-40%. Median throat radii cluster tightly at 8.9-9.6 micrometres across all four plugs; event volumes are lognormally distributed in every case; and residual mercury saturation, available for the two plugs with documented pore volume, is 49.5% and 51.6%, respectively. This reflects plug-to-plug variability, consistent with intrinsic pore-scale heterogeneity among the samples, rather than a population-level claim about Berea sandstone in general. Compared against an independently published Cleveland Quarries Berea benchmark, the present plugs show markedly higher porosity and permeability, consistent with the broader published Berea range. The results show that an event-resolved descriptor set can separate distributional similarity from scale-dependent variability and support the conclusion that Berea sandstone should not be assumed to have a unique absolute petrophysical signature without source-specific characterisation, though it remains a useful methodological reference rock for comparing procedures.

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Publication Date

30-9-2026

First Page

17

Last Page

30

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