Lithology identification of aquifers from geophysical well logs and fuzzy logic analysis: Shui-Lin Area, Taiwan

The purpose of this study is to construct a fuzzy lithology system from well logs to identify formation lithology of a groundwater aquifer system in order to better apply conventional well logging interpretation in hydro-geologic studies because well log responses of aquifers are sometimes different from those of conventional oil and gas reservoirs. The input variables for this system are the gamma-ray log reading, the separation between the spherically focused resistivity and the deep very-enhanced resistivity curves, and the borehole compensated sonic log reading. The output variable is groundwater formation lithology. All linguistic variables are based on five linguistic terms with a trapezoidal membership function. In this study, 50 data sets are clustered into 40 training sets and 10 testing sets for constructing the fuzzy lithology system and validating the ability of system prediction, respectively. The rule-based database containing 12 fuzzy lithology rules is developed from the training data sets, and the rule strength is weighted. A Madani inference system and the bisector of area defuzzification method are used for fuzzy inference and defuzzification. The success of training performance and the prediction ability were both 90%, with the calculated correlation of training and testing equal to 0.925 and 0.928, respectively. Well logs and core data from a clastic aquifer (depths 100–198m) in the Shui-Lin area of west-central Taiwan are used for testing the system’s construction. Comparison of results from core analysis, well logging and the fuzzy lithology system indicates that even though the well logging method can easily define a permeable sand formation, distinguishing between silts and sands and determining grain size variation in sands is more subjective. These shortcomings can be improved by a fuzzy lithology system that is able to yield more objective decisions than some conventional methods of log interpretation. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.