Data-Driven Modeling of Geometry-Adaptive Steady Heat Transfer based on Convolutional Neural Networks: Heat Convection

Abstract: In this paper, based on neural networks, we develop a data-driven model for extremely fast prediction of steady-state heat convection of a hot object with arbitrary complex geometry in a two-dimensional space. According to the governing equations, the steady-state heat convection is dominated by convection and thermal diffusion terms, thus the distribution of the physical fields would exhibit stronger correlations between adjacent points. Therefore, the proposed neural network model uses Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) layers as the encoder and Deconvolutional Neural Network (DCNN) layers as the decoder. Compared with fully connected (FC) network model, the CNN based model is good for capturing and reconstructing the spatial relationships of low-rank feature spaces, such as edge intersections, parallelism and symmetry. Furthermore, we applied the signed distance function (SDF) as the network input for representing the problem geometry, which contains more information compared to a binary image. For displaying the strong learning and generalization ability of the proposed network model, the training dataset only contains hot objects with simple geometries: triangles, quadrilaterals, pentagons, hexagons and dodecagons; while the validating cases use arbitrary and complex geometries. According to the study, the trained network model can accurately predict the velocity and temperature field of the problems with complex geometries which has never been seen by the network model during the model training; and the prediction speed is four orders faster than the CFD. The ability of the accurate and extremely faster prediction of the network model suggests the potentials of applying such kind of models to the applications of real-time control, optimization, and design in future.