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 (phi), 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. The analysis has been performed for the systems with phi is an element of (0.37,0.99) which covers five orders of magnitude a span for permeability k is an element of (0.78,2.1x105) and tortuosity T is an element of (1.03,2.74). It is shown that the CNNs can be used to predict the porosity, permeability, and tortuosity with good accuracy. With the usage of the CNN models, the relation between T and phi has been obtained and compared with the empirical estimate.