================================================== This a non-peer reviewed preprint submitted to EarthArXiv: An image- and BET-based Monte-Carlo approach to determine mineral accessible surface areas in sandstones Jin Ma, Geothermal Energy & Geofluids Group, Department of Earth Sciences (D-ERDW), ETH-Z¨urich,CH-8092, Switzerland. email:
[email protected] Martin O. Saar, Geothermal Energy & Geofluids Group, Department of Earth Sciences (D-ERDW), ETH-Z¨urich,CH-8092, Switzerland. email:
[email protected] Xiang-Zhao Kong, Geothermal Energy & Geofluids Group, Department of Earth Sciences (D-ERDW), ETH-Z¨urich,CH-8092, Switzerland. email:
[email protected] ================================================== 1 1 An image- and BET-based Monte-Carlo approach to 2 determine mineral accessible surface areas in sandstones ∗ 3 Jin Ma, Martin O. Saar, Xiang-Zhao Kong 4 Geothermal Energy and Geofluids Group, Department of Earth Sciences, ETH-Z¨urich,CH-8092, 5 Switzerland 6 Abstract 7 Accessible surface areas (ASAs) of individual rock-forming minerals exert a fun- 8 damental control on how minerals react with formation fluids. However, due to 9 lacking adequate quantification methods, determining the ASAs of specific minerals 10 in a multi-mineral rock at the appropriate scale still remains difficult. Whole-rock 11 Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) measurements at atomic scales cannot account for 12 the variability in ASAs of individual minerals, while image-based methods are in- 13 herently limited by the image pixel/voxel resolution. Here, we present a novel joint 14 method that overcomes the aforementioned limitations by appropriately downscal- 15 ing individual image-based ASAs with the support of a Monte-Carlo algorithm and 16 BET measurements.