Percolation and Physical Properties of Rock Salt

Abstract:

Textural equilibrium controls the distribution of the liquid phase in many naturally occurring porous materials such as partially molten rocks and alloys, salt-brine and ice-water systems. In these materials, pore geometry evolves to minimize the solid-liquid interfacial energy while maintaining a constant dihedral angle, θ, at solid–liquid contact lines. A characteristic of texturally equilibrated porous media, in the absence of deformation, is that the pore network percolates at any porosity for θ<60° while a percolation threshold exists for θ>60°. However, in ductile polycrystalline materials including rock salt, the balance between surface tension and ductile deformation controls the percolation of fluid pockets along grain corners and edges. Here we show sufficiently rapid deformation can overcome this threshold by elongating and connecting isolated pores by examining a large number of accessible salt samples from deep water Gulf of Mexico. We first confirm the percolation threshold in static laboratory experiments on synthetic salt samples with X-ray microtomography. We then provide field evidence on existence of interconnected pore space in rock salt in extremely low porosities, significantly below the static percolation threshold. Scaling arguments suggest that strain rates in salt are sufficient to overcome surface tension and may allow percolation. We also present the first level-set computations of three-dimensional texturally equilibrated melt networks in realistic rock fabrics. The resulting pore space is used to obtain the effective physical properties of rock, effective electrical conductivity and mechanical properties, with a novel numerical model.