Simulating Surface Wave Dynamics with Convolutional Networks

Abstract: We investigate the performance of fully convolutional networks to simulate the motion and interaction of surface waves in open and closed complex geometries. We focus on a U-Net architecture and analyse how well it generalises to geometric configurations not seen during training. We demonstrate that a modified U-Net architecture is capable of accurately predicting the height distribution of waves on a liquid surface within curved and multi-faceted open and closed geometries, when only simple box and right-angled corner geometries were seen during training. We also consider a separate and independent 3D CNN for performing time-interpolation on the predictions produced by our U-Net. This allows generating simulations with a smaller time-step size than the one the U-Net has been trained for.