Trends in porous media laboratory imaging and open science practices

Abstract

Understanding processes in porous media is fundamental to a broad spectrum of environmental, energy, and geoscience applications. These processes include multiphase fluid transport, interfacial dynamics, reactive transformations, and interactions with solids or microbial components, all governed by wettability, capillarity, and reactive transport at fluid-fluid and fluid-solid interfaces. Laboratory-based multiscale imaging provides critical insights into these phenomena, enabling direct visualization and quantitative characterization from the nanometer to meter scale. It is essential for advancing predictive models and optimizing the design of subsurface and engineered porous systems. This review presents an integrated overview of imaging techniques relevant to porous media research, emphasizing the type of information each method can provide, their applicability to porous media systems, and their inherent limitations. We highlight how imaging data are combined with quantitative analyses and modeling to bridge pore-scale mechanisms with continuum-scale behavior, and we critically discuss current challenges such as limited spatio-temporal resolution, sample representativity, and restricted data accessibility. We conduct an in-depth analysis on open-science trends in experimental and computational porous media research and find that, while open-access publishing has become widespread, the availability of imaging data and analysis code remains limited, often restricted to 'upon request'. Finally, we underscore the importance of open sharing of imaging datasets to enable reproducibility, foster cross-disciplinary integration, and support the development of robust predictive frameworks for porous media systems.