Myers, Michael T.2018-02-152018-02-15December 22015-12December 2http://hdl.handle.net/10657/2152Mudrocks are fine grained, extremely low porosity and permeability sedimentary rocks that contain significant amounts of clay minerals. These rocks are difficult to characterize their physical properties or test their mechanical behavior. Clay’s cation exchange capacity (CEC) make these rocks water sensitive due to double layer expansion or collapse. Conductometric titration and methylene blue colorimetry were used to measure CEC and compared to cobalt hexamine technique values provided by a vendor. In this work, we studied petrophysical and geomechanical properties of resedimented mudrock core samples. Three major properties were varied; they are clay’s percentage, cation Exchange capacity and brine salinity. The use of the reconsolidation technique allows us to create mud rocks in the laboratory while controlling mineralogy, sorting, brine salinity, and axial stress, this is similar to sand pack experiments performed by (Hathon & Myers, 2011) which showed that mineralogy, grain size, sorting, stress history and incipient overgrowth cements all affect the porosity as a function of depletion stress. Triaxial testing is commonly used to determine the failure envelope for mudrocks. The most common application of this technique requires multiple identical samples. In heterogeneous formation identical samples are often difficult to obtain. The twinning problem is overcome by performing ‘multistage’ tri-axial tests. These tests were performed on reconsolidated mud rocks to determine their strength properties (Salman, Myers, & Sharf Aldin, 2015). Strength data are compared based on the sample’s variations such as CEC, brine salinity, and clay content.application/pdfengThe author of this work is the copyright owner. UH Libraries and the Texas Digital Library have their permission to store and provide access to this work. Further transmission, reproduction, or presentation of this work is prohibited except with permission of the author(s).CECCation Exchange CapacityConductometric TitrationMethylene BlueClayMud RockStrengthPorosityPermeabilityMultistage triaxial testResedimentationReconsolidationGeomechanicsPetrophysicsGeotechnicalStressFunctionReservoir depthCorrection factorGrain size distributionParticle size distributionXRDMineralogySand contentClay contentShalesDouble layerSalinityPropertiesSwellingFriction angleHydraulic conductivity2018-02-15Thesisborn digital