Alternative Artificial Neural Network Structures for Turbulent Flow Velocity Field Prediction

Turbulence in fluids has been a popular research topic for many years due to its influence on a wide range of applications. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools are able to provide plenty of information about this phenomenon, but their computational cost often makes the use of these tools unfeasible. For that reason, in recent years, turbulence modelling using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) is becoming increasingly popular. These networks typically calculate directly the desired magnitude, having input information about the computational domain. In this paper, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for predicting different magnitudes of turbulent flows around different geometries by approximating the equations of the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS)-based realizable k - ε two-layer turbulence model is proposed. Using that CNN, alternative network structures are proposed to predict the velocity fields of a turbulent flow around different geometries on a rectangular channel, with a preliminary stage to predict pressure and vorticity fields before calculating the velocity fields, and the obtained results are compared with the ones obtained with the basic structure. The results demonstrate that the proposed structures clearly outperform the basic one, especially when the flow becomes uncertain. In addition, considering the results, the best network configuration is proposed. That network is tested with a domain with multiple geometries and a domain with a narrowing of the channel, which are domains with different conditions from the training ones, showing fairly accurate predictions.