An efficient ghost-cell immersed boundary method (GCIBM) for simulating turbulent flows in complex geometries is presented. A boundary condition is enforced through a ghost cell method. The reconstruction procedure allows systematic development of numerical schemes for treating the immersed boundary while preserving the overall second-order accuracy of the base solver. Both Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions can be treated. The current ghost cell treatment is both suitable for staggered and non-staggered Cartesian grids. The accuracy of the current method is validated using flow past a circular cylinder and large eddy simulation of turbulent flow over a wavy surface. Numerical results are compared with experimental data and boundary-fitted grid results. The method is further extended to an existing ocean model (MITGCM) to simulate geophysical flow over a three-dimensional bump. The method is easily implemented as evidenced by our use of several existing codes.

A Ghost-Cell Immersed Boundary Method for Flow in Complex Geometry

Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering

We present applications of modal analysis techniques to study, model, and control canonical aerodynamic flows. To illustrate how modal analysis techniques can provide physical insights in a complementary manner, we selected four fundamental examples of cylinder wakes, wall-bounded flows, airfoil wakes, and cavity flows. We also offer brief discussions on the outlook for modal analysis techniques, in light of rapid developments in data science.

https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10.2514/1.J058462

Modal Analysis of Fluid Flows: Applications and Outlook

Surrogate modeling for fluid flows based on physics-constrained deep learning without simulation data

Despite its great success, machine learning can have its limits when dealing with insufficient training data. A potential solution is the additional integration of prior knowledge into the training process which leads to the notion of informed machine learning. In this paper, we present a structured overview of various approaches in this field. We provide a definition and propose a concept for informed machine learning which illustrates its building blocks and distinguishes it from conventional machine learning. We introduce a taxonomy that serves as a classification framework for informed machine learning approaches. It considers the source of knowledge, its representation, and its integration into the machine learning pipeline. Based on this taxonomy, we survey related research and describe how different knowledge representations such as algebraic equations, logic rules, or simulation results can be used in learning systems. This evaluation of numerous papers on the basis of our taxonomy uncovers key methods in the field of informed machine learning.

Informed Machine Learning -- A Taxonomy and Survey of Integrating Knowledge into Learning Systems

Reduced Order Modeling (ROM) for engineering applications has been a major research focus in the past few decades due to the unprecedented physical insight into turbulence offered by high-fidelity CFD. The primary goal of a ROM is to model the key physics/features of a flow-field without computing the full Navier-Stokes (NS) equations. This is accomplished by projecting the high-dimensional dynamics to a low-dimensional subspace, typically utilizing dimensionality reduction techniques like Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD), coupled with Galerkin projection. In this work, we demonstrate a deep learning based approach to build a ROM using the POD basis of canonical DNS datasets, for turbulent flow control applications. We find that a type of Recurrent Neural Network, the Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) which has been primarily utilized for problems like speech modeling and language translation, shows attractive potential in modeling temporal dynamics of turbulence. Additionally, we introduce the Hurst Exponent as a tool to study LSTM behavior for non-stationary data, and uncover useful characteristics that may aid ROM development for a variety of applications.

A Deep Learning based Approach to Reduced Order Modeling for Turbulent Flow Control using LSTM Neural Networks

Time-series learning of latent-space dynamics for reduced-order model closure

High-fidelity modeling of turbulent flows is one of the major challenges in computational physics, with diverse applications in engineering, earth sciences and astrophysics, among many others. The rising popularity of high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques like direct numerical simulation (DNS) and large eddy simulation (LES) have made significant inroads into the problem. However, they remain out of reach for many practical three-dimensional flows characterized by extremely large domains and transient phenomena. Therefore designing efficient and accurate data-driven generative approaches to model turbulence is a necessity. We propose a novel training approach for dimensionality reduction and spatio-temporal modeling of the three-dimensional dynamics of turbulence using a combination of Convolutional autoencoder and the Convolutional LSTM neural networks. The quality of the emulated turbulent fields is assessed with rigorous physics-based statistical tests, instead of visual assessments. The results show significant promise in the training methodology to generate physically consistent turbulent flows at a small fraction of the computing resources required for DNS.

Compressed Convolutional LSTM: An Efficient Deep Learning framework to Model High Fidelity 3D Turbulence

In the recent years, deep learning approaches have shown much promise in modeling complex systems in the physical sciences. A major challenge in deep learning of PDEs is enforcing physical constraints and boundary conditions. In this work, we propose a general framework to directly embed the notion of an incompressible fluid into Convolutional Neural Networks, and apply this to coarse-graining of turbulent flow. These physics-embedded neural networks leverage interpretable strategies from numerical methods and computational fluid dynamics to enforce physical laws and boundary conditions by taking advantage the mathematical properties of the underlying equations. We demonstrate results on three-dimensional fully-developed turbulence, showing that this technique drastically improves local conservation of mass, without sacrificing performance according to several other metrics characterizing the fluid flow.

Embedding Hard Physical Constraints in Neural Network Coarse-Graining of 3D Turbulence

Direct Numerical Simulations (DNSs) of high Reynolds number turbulent flows, encountered in engineering, earth sciences, and astrophysics, are not tractable because of the curse of dimensionality a...

Arvind Mohan

Papers

A Deep Learning based Approach to Reduced Order Modeling for Turbulent Flow Control using LSTM Neural Networks

Time-series learning of latent-space dynamics for reduced-order model closure

Compressed Convolutional LSTM: An Efficient Deep Learning framework to Model High Fidelity 3D Turbulence

Embedding Hard Physical Constraints in Neural Network Coarse-Graining of 3D Turbulence

Spatio-temporal deep learning models of 3D turbulence with physics informed diagnostics