Estimation of Unconsolidated Sand Porosity from Texture Parameters

The knowledge of unconsolidated sand porosity is of great importance to many areas of petroleum geology and exploration geophysics. To estimate the unconsolidated sand porosity, we study the relations between the unconsolidated sand porosity and the texture parameters (including sorting coefficient, mean grain size, and roundness) through the experiments on the quartz sand and glass bead samples in this work, based on which the unconsolidated sand porosity can be estimated from the texture parameters. The results show that the unconsolidated sand porosity decreases with the sorting coefficient and it changes periodically with the mean grain size with a decreasing trend. Furthermore, the increase of roundness also decreases the porosity, which is significant under the small sorting coefficient. Based on the experimental data, the empirical formula linking the texture parameters to the unconsolidated sand porosity is built, which predicts the experimental data well.