As one of the most basic materials of engineering coatings, rock has complex structural characteristics in its medium space. However, it is still difficult to quantitatively characterize the microstructure of rock coatings, such as connectivity and aggregation degree. For this paper, based on a CT-scan model of rock coating, we extracted the network topology of a rock coating sample and verified that its microstructure parameter distribution accords with Barabasi and Albert (BA) scale-free theory. Based on this result, relying on the BA scale-free theory, a dual-porosity network model of rock coating was constructed. We extracted the network structure of the model to verify it, and analyzed the distribution of the microstructure parameters of the model, such as degree distribution, average path length and throat length distribution. At the same time, we analyzed the evolution trend of the permeability of the coating model with the microscopic parameters. Then we discuss the influence of the change of structural parameters on the microstructure of the coating model, and compared with the mainstream rock models at the present stage, the rationality and accuracy of the models are analyzed. This provides a new method for studying the mechanical and permeability properties of engineering coating materials.
As one of the most significant clean energy sources, the migration characteristics and extraction processes of coalbed methane (CBM) have been extensively studied. The structural distribution and evolutionary characteristics of reservoir fractures, as the main conduit for gas migration, significantly affect the permeability and gas production. However, few models have been able to quantitatively and accurately explore reservoir micro-macro interactions under coupled thermal-fluid-solid effects. This work develops a new highly coupled model based on the widely-adopted power-law function to quantify reservoir thermal conduction effect, gas pressure evolution, reservoir deformation, in-situ stress, adsorption-desorption effect and reservoir microstructure evolution. Three parameters are adopted to quantitatively characterize the reservoir structure: (1) fracture power index (to characterize the fracture density), (2) fracture length ratio rf (to characterize the fracture size) and (3) the maximum fracture length l. The results demonstrate that the fractal network is a special kind of network in the power-law length distribution. And the proposed power-law seepage model is able to accurately characterize the evolution of reservoir microstructure and the impact of microevolution on extraction under multi-field coupling effects, compared to the traditional power-law model. The proposed model can provide a good theoretical and practical support for the study of CBM migration and extraction.