Abstract
We present a comprehensive dataset of two-phase flow Lattice-Boltzmann simulations, generated using over 100 million GPU hours, covering a wide range of wetting conditions, capillary numbers, and porous geometries. While multiphase flow has traditionally been studied through laboratory experiments, the growing power of computational simulations provides a scalable and efficient alternative. Our simulations, validated against synchrotron beamline experiments, reveal key insights into the effects of wettability, ganglion dynamics, and flow behaviors that can be used to either substantiate current upscaling theories or develop new approaches. The dataset includes 50 relative permeability curves and over 25,000 distinct fluid configurations. Acquiring equivalent data through experiments would be impractical using current techniques, and the computational resources required far exceed those typically available without direct access to high-performance facilities. This open-access dataset enables broad collaboration within the porous media research community and offers a valuable foundation for future studies on pore-scale transport, relative permeability prediction, and data-driven modeling approaches.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
All simulation files are available at https://zenodo.org/records/13836047.
Code availability
LBPM is available through the Open Porous Media Project - https://github.com/OPM. The software is published under GPL-3.0 license (GNU General Public License).
References
Higgs, S. et al. Comparative analysis of hydrogen, methane and nitrogen relative permeability: Implications for underground 316 hydrogen storage. J. Energy Storage 73, 108827, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.est.2023.108827 (2023).
Zhang, Y., Nishizawa, O., Kiyama, T., Chiyonobu, S. & Xue, Z. Flow behaviour of supercritical co2 and brine in berea sandstone during drainage and imbibition revealed by medical x-ray ct images. Geophys. J. Int. 197, 1789–1807, https://doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggu089 (2014).
Mularcyk, A. et al. Droplet and percolation network interactions in a fuel cell gas diffusion layer. J. Electrochem. Soc. 167, 084506, https://doi.org/10.1149/1945-7111/ab8c85 (2020).
Eller, J. et al. Progress in in situ x-ray tomographic microscopy of liquid water in gas diffusion layers of PEFC. J. Electrochem. Soc. 158, B963, https://doi.org/10.1149/1.3596556 (2011).
Arlt, T., Klages, M., Messerschmidt, M., Scholta, J. & Manke, I. Influence of artificially aged gas diffusion layers on the water management of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells analyzed with in-operando synchrotron imaging. Energy 118, 502–511, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2016.10.061 (2017).
Andrä, H. et al. Digital rock physics benchmarks—part ii: Computing effective properties. Comput. & Geosci. 50, 33–43 (2013).
Fredrich, J. T. et al. Digital rocks: Developing an emerging technology through to a proven capability deployed in the business. In SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition?, SPE–170752 (SPE, 2014).
McClure, J. E., Wang, H., Prins, J. F., Miller, C. T. & Feng, W.-C. Petascale application of a coupled cpu-gpu algorithm for simulation and analysis of multiphase flow solutions in porous medium systems. In 2014 IEEE 28th international parallel and distributed processing symposium, 583–592 (IEEE, 2014).
Meakin, P. & Tartakowsky, A. M. Modeling and simulation of pore-scale multiphase fluid flow and reactive transport in fractured and porous media. J. Energy Storage 47, RG3002, https://doi.org/10.1029/2008RG000263 (2009).
Blunt, M. J. Flow in porous media—pore-network models and multiphase flow. Curr. opinion colloid & interface science 6, 197–207 (2001).
Jettestuen, E., Helland, J. O. & Prodanovic´, M. A level set method for simulating capillary-controlled displacements at the pore scale with nonzero contact angles. Water Resour. Res. 49, 4645–4661 (2013).
Badalassi, V. E., Ceniceros, H. D. & Banerjee, S. Computation of multiphase systems with phase field models. J. computational physics 190, 371–397 (2003).
Alpak, F. O., Zacharoudiou, I., Berg, S., Dietderich, J. & Saxena, N. Direct simulation of pore-scale two-phase visco- capillary flow on large digital rock images using a phase-field lattice boltzmann method on general-purpose graphics processing units. Comput. Geosci. 23, 849–880, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10596-019-9818-0 (2019).
Bandara, U. C. et al. Smoothed particle hydrodynamics pore-scale simulations of unstable immiscible flow in porous media. Adv. water resources 62, 356–369 (2013).
Liu, H. et al. Multiphase lattice boltzmann simulations for porous media applications: A review. Comput. Geosci. 20, 777–805 (2016).
McClure, J. E., Li, Z., Berrill, M. & Ramstad, T. The lbpm software package for simulating multiphase flow on digital images of porous rocks. Comput. Geosci. 25, 871–895 (2021).
Armstrong, R. T. et al. Beyond darcy’s law: The role of phase topology and ganglion dynamics for two-fluid flow. Phys. Rev. E 94, 043113 (2016).
Wang, Y. et al. Accelerated computation of relative permeability by coupled morphological and direct multiphase flow simulation. J. Comput. Phys 401, 108966 (2020).
Chung, J. et al. Accelerating Multiphase Flow Simulations with Denoising Diffusion Model Driven Initializations. JGR MachineLearning and Computation 1(4), e2024JH000293 (2024).
Santos, J. E. et al. Poreflow-net: A 3d convolutional neural network to predict fluid flow through porous media. Adv. Water Resour. 138, 103539 (2020).
Latva-Kokko, M. & Rothman, D. H. Scaling of dynamic contact angles in a lattice-boltzmann model. Phys. review letters 98, 254503 (2007).
Garfi, G. et al. Determination of the spatial distribution of wetting in the pore networks of rocks. J. Colloid Interface Sci 613, 786–795 (2022).
Payatakes, A. & Dias, M. M. Immiscible microdisplacement and ganglion dynamics in porous media. Rev. Chem. Eng. 2, 85–174 (1984).
Purswani, P., Tawfik, M. S., Karpyn, Z. T. & Johns, R. T. On the development of a relative permeability equation of state. Comput. Geosci. 24, 807–818 (2020).
Picchi, D. & Battiato, I. Relative permeability scaling from pore-scale flow regimes. Water Resour. Res. 55, 3215–3233 (2019).
McClure, J. E. et al. Relative permeability as a stationary process: Energy fluctuations in immiscible displacement. Phys. Fluids 34 (2022).
Hansen, A., Flekkøy, E. G., Sinha, S. & Slotte, P. A. A statistical mechanics framework for immiscible and incompressible two-phase flow in porous media. Adv. Water Resour. 171, 104336 (2023).
Bedeaux, D. & Kjelstrup, S. Fluctuation-dissipation theorems for multiphase flow in porous media. Entropy 24, 46 (2021).
Quintard, M. & Whitaker, S. Two-phase flow in heterogeneous porous media: The method of large-scale averaging. Transp. porous media 3, 357–413 (1988).
Reynolds, C. A., Menke, H., Andrew, M., Blunt, M. J. & Krevor, S. Dynamic fluid connectivity during steady-state multiphase flow in a sandstone. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 114, 8187–8192 (2017).
McPhee, C., Reed, J. & Zubizarreta, I. Core analysis: a best practice guide (Elsevier, 2015).
Sripal, E. & James, L. Application of an optimization method for the restoration of core samples for scal experiments. Petrophysics 59, 72–81 (2018).
Berg, S. et al. Real-time 3d imaging of haines jumps in porous media flow. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 110, 3755–3759 (2013).
Schlüter, S., Sheppard, A., Brown, K. & Wildenschild, D. Image processing of multiphase images obtained via x-ray microtomography: a review. Water Resour. Res. 50, 3615–3639 (2014).
McClure, J., Adalsteinsson, D., Pan, C., Gray, W. & Miller, C. Approximation of interfacial properties in multiphase porous medium systems. Adv. water resources 30, 354–365 (2007).
McClure, J. E., Berrill, M., Gray, W. & Miller, C. Tracking interface and common curve dynamics for two-fluid flow in porous media. J. Fluid Mech. 796, 211–232 (2016).
McClure, J., Pan, C., Adalsteinsson, D., Gray, W. & Miller, C. Estimating interfacial areas resulting from lattice boltzmann simulation of two-fluid-phase flow in a porous medium. In Developments in Water Science, vol. 55, 23–35 (Elsevier, 2004).
Gray, W. G. & Miller, C. T. Introduction to the thermodynamically constrained averaging theory for porous medium systems, vol. 696 (Springer, 2014).
Wyckoff, R. & Botset, H. The flow of gas-liquid mixtures through unconsolidated sands. Physics 7, 325–345 (1936).
Ramstad, T. Bentheimer micro-ct with waterflood. https://doi.org/10.17612/P7795W (2025).
Armstrong, R., Mostaghimi, P. & McClure, J. Multimineral model. https://doi.org/10.17612/NXDJ-0Y17 (2025).
Armstrong, R., Rücker, M., Berg, S. & McClure, J. Fractional flow experiments. https://doi.org/10.17612/FP1M-F210 (2025).
Li, Z., McClure, J. & Ramstad, T. Bentheimer sandstone two-fluid flow simulation resembling special core analysis protocol. https://doi.org/10.17612/3qz6-f710 (2025).
Armstrong, R. Lbpm simulations, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13836047 (2024).
Lin, Q. et al. Minimal surfaces in porous media: Pore-scale imaging of multiphase flow in an altered-wettability bentheimer sandstone. Phys. Rev. E 99, 063105 (2019).
Khayrat, K. & Jenny, P. Subphase approach to model hysteretic two-phase flow in porous media. Transp. porous media 111, 1–25 (2016).
Al-Zubaidi, F. et al. Effective permeability of an immiscible fluid in porous media determined from its geometric state. Phys. Rev. Fluids 8, 064004 (2023).
Alzubaidi, F. et al. The Impact of Wettability on the Co-moving Velocity of Two-Fluid Flow in Porous Media. Transp Porous Med 151, 1967–1982 (2024).
Armstrong, R. T. et al. Multiscale characterization of wettability in porous media. Transp. Porous Media 140, 215–240 (2021).
Acknowledgements
R.T.A. acknowledges Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT210100165) and Discovery (DP210102689). This research used resources from the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the DE-AC05-00OR22725 contract.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
R.T.A. contributed digital domains for wettability studies, conducted investigations on wettability and Capillary number effects, provided funding acquisition for wettability studies, and wrote the original draft. O.T. provided formal analysis of simulation convergence, data curation, and visualization of results. Y.D.W. contributed to the development of multi-mineral models and related wettability studies. Z.L. developed the LBPM wetting models and related software capabilities. P.M. contributed to the wettability studies and related funding acquisition. S.B. contributed to the conceptualization and investigation of simulation protocols. T.R. contributed to the conceptualization and investigation of simulation protocols. M.R. contributed to the processing of the experimental data. J.M. developed the LBPM software, conducted the formal analysis, investigation, conceptualization, and acquisition of computational resources. All authors contributed to the review and editing of the article.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Armstrong, R.T., Tavakkoli, O., Da Wang, Y. et al. Lattice-Boltzmann for Porous Media: 100M+ GPU Hours. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06823-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06823-1
