Experimental Rheological and Filtration Properties of Water-Based Drilling Fluids: A Two-Year Laboratory Dataset

This dataset contains experimental rheological, filtration, and physicochemical measurements obtained from a two-year laboratory campaign on water-based drilling fluids (WBM), conducted from January 2023 to December 2024. The dataset comprises 620 unique drilling-fluid formulations representing six formulation families and six temperature levels (25, 50, 75, 100, 120, and 150 °C). The dataset was developed to support data-driven drilling-fluid design and machine-learning prediction of key WBM properties. The input variables include concentrations of bentonite, barite, CMC-HV, CMC-LV, PAC-R, PAC-L, XCD polymer, KCl, NaCl, KOH, lubricant, water volume, and test temperature. The target variables include mud weight, plastic viscosity, yield point, apparent viscosity, gel strengths, API fluid loss, Herschel–Bulkley parameters (n and k), pH, Marsh funnel viscosity, and methylene blue test (MBT) values. Experimental measurements were conducted in accordance with API RP 13B-1, 5th Edition (2019), where applicable. Measurements were performed in triplicate for each formulation, and the reported values represent arithmetic means after statistical outlier screening using the Grubbs test at α = 0.05. The dataset covers conventional, polymer-enhanced, KCl-polymer, high-density/barite-weighted, low-solid, and salt-tolerant water-based drilling-fluid systems. Measurements were performed using standard rotational viscometry, filtration, density, pH, Marsh funnel, and MBT testing equipment, with additional high-temperature/high-pressure measurements for selected formulations. The dataset is intended for research in drilling-fluid engineering, petroleum engineering, rheology, experimental design, machine learning, predictive modeling, and data-driven mud formulation optimization.