Digital Rocks Portal (Digital Porous Media): Connecting data, simulation and community

¹ Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
² Texas Advanced Computing Center, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
³ Advanced Research Computing, Virginia Tech, VT, USA
⁴ Center for Nonlinear Studies & Earth and Environmental Sciences, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA
⁵ University of New South Wales alumna, Sydney, Australia
⁶ Petroleum Engineering Department, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

^* Corresponding author: masha@utexas.edu

Abstract

Digital Rocks Portal (DRP, https://www.digitalrocksportal.org) organizes and preserves imaged datasets and experimental measurements of porous materials in subsurface, and beyond, with the mission to connect them to simulation and analysis, as well as educate the research community. We have over 150 projects represented in more than 200 publications, and an active community that reuses the data, most recently in multiple machine learning applications for automating image analysis as well as the prediction of transport. Such automation is crucial for performing formation evaluation tasks in near-real time. We present benchmark datasets that have played a role in recent machine learning prediction successes in the field. We further discuss the vision for further research advances, educational materials, as well as growth and sustainability plan of this digital rock physics community resource. In particular, we are in the process of expanding into a broader repository of engineered porous materials, specifically those for energy storage and the portal will transition to Digital Porous Media (DPM) in near future.