Addressing performance improvement of a neural network model for Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes solutions with high wake formation

Abstract

Purpose

Deep-learning techniques are recently gaining a lot of importance in the field of turbulence. This study focuses on addressing the problem of data imbalance to improve the performance of an existing deep learning neural network to infer the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes solution, proposed by Thuerey et al. (2020), in the cases of airfoils with high wake formation behind them. The model is based on a U-Net architecture, which calculates pressure and velocity solutions for fluid flow around an airfoil.

Design/methodology/approach

In this work, we propose various methods for training the model on selectively generated data with different distributions, which would be representative of the under-performing test samples. The property we chose for selectively generating data was the fraction of negative x-velocity in the domain. We have used Grad-CAM to compare the layer activations of different models trained using the proposed methods.

Findings

We observed that using our methods, the average performance on the samples with high wake formation (i.e. flow over airfoils at high angle of attack) has improved. Using one of the proposed methods, an average performance improvement of 15.65% was observed for samples of unknown airfoils compared to a similar model trained using the original method.

Originality/value

This work demonstrates the use of imbalanced learning in the field of fluid mechanics. The performance of the model is improved by giving significance to the distribution of the training data without changes to the model architecture.

Citation

Ajaya Kumar, A. and Assam, A. (2024), "Addressing performance improvement of a neural network model for Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes solutions with high wake formation", Engineering Computations, Vol. 41 No. 7, pp. 1740-1765. https://doi.org/10.1108/EC-08-2023-0446