A cement bond log documents the evaluation of the integrity of

cement A cement is a binder, a chemical substance used for construction that sets, hardens, and adheres to other materials to bind them together. Cement is seldom used on its own, but rather to bind sand and gravel ( aggregate) together. Cement mi ...

work performed on an oil well. In the process of drilling and completing a well, cement is injected through the

wellbore A borehole is a narrow shaft bored in the ground, either vertically or horizontally. A borehole may be constructed for many different purposes, including the extraction of water ( drilled water well and tube well), other liquids (such as petrole ...

and rises up the annulus between the steel casing and the

formation Formation may refer to: Linguistics * Back-formation, the process of creating a new lexeme by removing or affixes * Word formation, the creation of a new word by adding affixes Mathematics and science * Cave formation or speleothem, a secondar ...

. A sonic tool is typically run on wireline by a service company that detects the bond of the cement to the casing and formation via a principle based on

resonance Resonance describes the phenomenon of increased amplitude that occurs when the frequency of an applied Periodic function, periodic force (or a Fourier analysis, Fourier component of it) is equal or close to a natural frequency of the system ...

. Casing that is not bound has a higher resonant vibration than that which is bound, causing the imparted energy from the sonic signal to be transferred to the formation. In this sense, the

amplitude The amplitude of a periodic variable is a measure of its change in a single period (such as time or spatial period). The amplitude of a non-periodic signal is its magnitude compared with a reference value. There are various definitions of am ...

of the

waveform In electronics, acoustics, and related fields, the waveform of a signal is the shape of its graph as a function of time, independent of its time and magnitude scales and of any displacement in time.David Crecraft, David Gorham, ''Electro ...

received is the basic measurement that is evaluated. The data is collected by the tool and recorded on a log which is used by the oil producing company as an indicator of zonal isolation in the well. There are production reasons and legal reasons (governed by a petroleum regulatory body in each individual state) that dictate the well must have specific areas of isolation.

References

{{reflist Well logging Petroleum engineering