Measurement and Modeling of Water in Porous Media Using Millimeter-wave and Terahertz Spectroscopy

Bouchard, Jacob

Etd

Measurement and Modeling of Water in Porous Media Using Millimeter-wave and Terahertz Spectroscopy

Public Deposited

In many industrial and manufacturing processes, determining the presence and concentration of water in a variety of materials is necessary. In some of these situations, taking traditional, contact dependent, measurements are either impossible or impractical. By exploiting the strong interaction between THz radiation and water, a non-contact volumetric moisture sensor can be designed. This sensor will operate within the band from 100 GHz to approximately 1 THz, allowing it to be tuned based on the optical thickness of the sample under inspection. However, the optical thickness not only depends on the complex dielectric constant, but also on the structure of the sample and can be a strong function of frequency. Optimizing the sensor performance depends on the details of the signature science and phenomenology of each specific application. This work will outline two distinct applications where THz is used to detect moisture to augment and improve industrial processes. The two applications are: 1) A non-contact volumetric moisture sensor for paper and pulp manufacturing (sponsored by US DOE) and 2) A novel porosity imaging technique to measure bulk porosity as well as image pore size distribution in carbonate rocks for oil wellsite evaluation (sponsored and in collaboration with Aramco Americas: Aramco Research Center - Houston).

Creator