Neural Networks for Predicting Permeability Tensors of 2D Porous Media: Comparison of Convolution- and Transformer-based Architectures

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Hauptverfasser: Vargdal, Sigurd, Reis, Paula, Sveinsson, Henrik Andersen, Linga, Gaute
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Vargdal, Sigurd
Reis, Paula
Sveinsson, Henrik Andersen
Linga, Gaute
author_facet Vargdal, Sigurd
Reis, Paula
Sveinsson, Henrik Andersen
Linga, Gaute
contents Permeability is a central concept in the macroscopic description of flow through porous media, with applications spanning from oil recovery to hydrology. Traditional methods for determining the permeability tensor involving flow simulations or experiments can be time consuming and resource-intensive, while analytical methods, e.g., based on the Kozeny-Carman equation, may be too simplistic for accurate prediction based on pore-scale features. In this work, we explore deep learning as a more efficient alternative for predicting the permeability tensor based on two-dimensional binary images of porous media, segmented into solid ($1$) and void ($0$) regions. We generate a dataset of 24,000 synthetic random periodic porous media samples with specified porosity and characteristic length scale. Using Lattice-Boltzmann simulations, we compute the permeability tensor for flow through these samples with values spanning three orders of magnitude. We evaluate three families of image-based deep learning models: ResNet (ResNet-$50$ and ResNet-$101$), Vision Transformers (ViT-T$16$ and ViT-S$16$) and ConvNeXt (Tiny and Small). To improve model generalisation, we employ techniques such as weight decay, learning rate scheduling, and data augmentation. The effect of data augmentation and dataset size on model performance is studied, and we find that they generally increase the accuracy of permeability predictions. We also show that ConvNeXt and ResNet converge faster than ViT and degrade in performance if trained for too long. ConvNeXt-Small achieved the highest $R^2$ score of $0.99460$ on $4,000$ unseen test samples. These findings underscore the potential to use image-based neural networks to predict permeability tensors accurately.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_01517
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neural Networks for Predicting Permeability Tensors of 2D Porous Media: Comparison of Convolution- and Transformer-based Architectures
Vargdal, Sigurd
Reis, Paula
Sveinsson, Henrik Andersen
Linga, Gaute
Fluid Dynamics
Machine Learning
Computational Physics
Geophysics
Permeability is a central concept in the macroscopic description of flow through porous media, with applications spanning from oil recovery to hydrology. Traditional methods for determining the permeability tensor involving flow simulations or experiments can be time consuming and resource-intensive, while analytical methods, e.g., based on the Kozeny-Carman equation, may be too simplistic for accurate prediction based on pore-scale features. In this work, we explore deep learning as a more efficient alternative for predicting the permeability tensor based on two-dimensional binary images of porous media, segmented into solid ($1$) and void ($0$) regions. We generate a dataset of 24,000 synthetic random periodic porous media samples with specified porosity and characteristic length scale. Using Lattice-Boltzmann simulations, we compute the permeability tensor for flow through these samples with values spanning three orders of magnitude. We evaluate three families of image-based deep learning models: ResNet (ResNet-$50$ and ResNet-$101$), Vision Transformers (ViT-T$16$ and ViT-S$16$) and ConvNeXt (Tiny and Small). To improve model generalisation, we employ techniques such as weight decay, learning rate scheduling, and data augmentation. The effect of data augmentation and dataset size on model performance is studied, and we find that they generally increase the accuracy of permeability predictions. We also show that ConvNeXt and ResNet converge faster than ViT and degrade in performance if trained for too long. ConvNeXt-Small achieved the highest $R^2$ score of $0.99460$ on $4,000$ unseen test samples. These findings underscore the potential to use image-based neural networks to predict permeability tensors accurately.
title Neural Networks for Predicting Permeability Tensors of 2D Porous Media: Comparison of Convolution- and Transformer-based Architectures
topic Fluid Dynamics
Machine Learning
Computational Physics
Geophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01517