Well cementing principles

Solidification. In principle, any solid that contains firmly bound water may be suitable as a solidification form for HTO. This includes drying agents, such as silica gel, molecular sieves, and calcium sulfate, as well as hydraulic cement and organic polymers. Most experience is available with cement, which has been used to solidify non-high-level waste for quite a while. 

From these principles, new instruments for the characterization of oil wells by NMR have been designed and are now routinely used to obtain rock porosity, water, oil and gas saturations, and other quantities of interest to the oil engineer. Applications have also appeared in other fields such as civil engineering (water in cement, bricks or clays), polymer engineering (solvent in solid polymers or polymer-polymer mixtures) or fluid mechanics. Specific methods or hardware are being developed for nonmedical... 

It was shown by Delesse (1848) that the volume fraction of a given phase is equal to the average surface fraction in a 2D microstructure provided the number of sections analysed is large enough to be statistically representative. This principle is widely used in materials science to quantify elements of microstructures and applies well to cement and concrete observed in SEM by BSE on polished sections. 

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