User Story

Automated Microscopy for Petrography Characterization and Digitization Services

byZEISS Microscopy 27 June 2022 1 min read

Introduction

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.

Felix Thadeu Teixeira Gonçalves Business Development Director at Solintec

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."

Leonardo Morejano Halfen, geologist and coordinator responsible for Solintec’s petrography laboratory, analyzing a pre-salt slide with ZEISS Axioscan.

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.

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