Automated Microscopy for Petrography Characterization and Digitization Services
Company expands services with ZEISS Axioscan slide scanning system
Within the oil and gas industry, exploration and production (E&P) is the early stage of energy production, which includes searching and extracting oil and gas. Solintec is a Brazilian company with 30 years of experience providing services to E&P companies, including management of subsurface samples and characterization of rocks and fluids.
While Solintec has provided analytical microscopy analyses to customers using ZEISS Axio Imager 2 light microscopes for conventional petrographic descriptions of samples, digitization of thin sections of rock was being outsourced to distant, international labs. To fill this market need locally, Solintec acquired the ZEISS Axioscan automated microscope, which enabled them to expand their services and offer petrographic rock characterization and digitization services.
Our laboratory has a good variety of microscopes, but with the arrival of ZEISS Axioscan, our petrography services expanded and began to meet a need in the national market – which is digitization.
Example Images of Thin Rock Sections
Collected with ZEISS Axioscan at Solintec
Carbonate Rock – Spherulite (Pre-Salt Reservoir)
Polarized Light Microscopy
Clastic Rock – Eolian-Fluvial Sandstone
Polarized Light Microscopy
Clastic Rock – Eolian-Fluvial Sandstone
Brightfield Light Microscopy
Demand for Digitization is Growing
Since the company started offering the service in November 2020, the demand has been continuously growing.
For Gonçalves, it is a new line of revenue within a traditional area: "For now we are exploring the digitization part. This means turning the blade into a file that can be accessed by anyone anywhere in the world using ZEISS software. This is already generating demand for the project and service."
Looking Towards Artificial Intelligence
Solintec intends to explore further possibilities with Axioscan.
One area under review is to incorporate artificial intelligence with ZEISS Intellesis to speed up and automate the description process of petrography samples. This includes point counting, phase distributions and other qualitative descriptions. With the large amount of data generated with Axioscan’s incredible throughput, these analyses are not possible with manual methods.