Reconstructing Turbulent Flows Using Spatio-Temporal Physical Dynamics

Accurate simulation of turbulent flows is of crucial importance in many branches of science and engineering. Direct numerical simulation (DNS) provides the highest fidelity means of capturing all intricate physics of turbulent transport. However, the method is computationally expensive because of the wide range of turbulence scales that must be accounted for in such simulations. Large eddy simulation (LES) provides an alternative. In such simulations, the large scales of the flow are resolved and the effects of small scales are modelled. Reconstruction of the DNS field from the low-resolution LES is needed for a wide variety of applications. Thus the construction of super-resolution (SR) methodologies that can provide this reconstruction has become an area of active research. In this work, a new physics-guided neural network is developed for such a reconstruction. The method leverages the partial differential equation that underlies the flow dynamics in the design of spatio-temporal model architecture. A degradation-based refinement method is also developed to enforce physical constraints and to further reduce the accumulated reconstruction errors over long periods. Detailed DNS data on two turbulent flow configurations are used to assess the performance of the model.