A surrogate neural network model for resolving the flow field in serial calculations of steady turbulent flows with a resolution of the nearwall region
Abstract:
When modeling turbulent flows in practical applications, it is often necessary to carry out a series of calculations of bodies of similar topology. For example, bodies that differ in the shape of the fairing. The use of convolutional neural networks allows to reduce the number of calculations in a series, restoring some of them based on calculations already performed. The paper proposes a method that allows to apply a convolutional neural network regardless of the method of constructing a computational mesh. To do this, the flow field is reinterpolated to a uniform mesh along with the body itself. The geometry of the body is set using the signed distance function and masking. The restoration of the flow field based on part of the calculations for similar geometries is carried out using a neural network of the UNet type with a spatial attention mechanism. The resolution of the nearwall region, which is a critical condition for turbulent modeling, is based on the equations obtained in the nearwall domain decomposition method.
A demonstration of the method is given for the case of a flow around a rounded plate by a turbulent air flow with different rounding at fixed parameters of the incoming flow with the Reynolds number $Re=10^{5}$ and the Mach number $M=0.15$. Since flows with such parameters of the incoming flow can be considered incompressible, only the velocity components are studied directly. The flow fields, velocity and friction profiles obtained by the surrogate model and numerically are compared. The analysis is carried out both on the plate and on the rounding. The simulation results confirm the prospects of the proposed approach. In particular, it was shown that even if the model is used at the maximum permissible limits of its applicability, friction can be obtained with an accuracy of up to 90%. The work also analyzes the constructed architecture of the neural network. The obtained surrogate model is compared with alternative models based on a variational autoencoder or the principal component analysis using radial basis functions. Based on this comparison, the advantages of the proposed method are demonstrated.
Keywords:aerodynamics, turbulence, near-wall domain decomposition, convolutional neural network, UNet, attention, signed distance function
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