Predicting Porosity, Permeability, and Tortuosity of Porous Media from Images by Deep Learning

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are utilized to encode the relation between initial configurations of obstacles and three fundamental quantities in porous media: porosity (varphi), permeability k, and tortuosity (T). The two-dimensional systems with obstacles are considered. The fluid flow through a porous medium is simulated with the lattice Boltzmann method. It is demonstrated that the CNNs are able to predict the porosity, permeability, and tortuosity with good accuracy. With the usage of the CNN models, the relation between T and varphi has been reproduced and compared with the empirical estimate. The analysis has been performed for the systems with varphi ∈ (0.37,0.99) which covers five orders of magnitude span for permeability k ∈ (0.78, 2.1× 105) and tortuosity T ∈ (1.03,2.74).