Physics informed data-driven near-wall modelling for lattice Boltzmann simulation of high Reynolds number turbulent flows

Abstract: Data-driven approaches offer novel opportunities for improving the performance of turbulent flow simulations, which are critical to wide-ranging applications from wind farms and aerodynamic designs to weather and climate forecasting. While conventional continuum Navier-Stokes solvers have been the subject of a significant amount of work in this domain, there has hitherto been very limited effort in the same direction for the more scalable and highly performant lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), even though it has been successfully applied to a variety of turbulent flow simulations using large-eddy simulation (LES) techniques. In this work, we establish a data-driven framework for the LES-based lattice Boltzmann simulation of near-wall turbulent flow fields. We do this by training neural networks using improved delayed detached eddy simulation data. Crucially, this is done in combination with physics-based information that substantially constrains the data-driven predictions. Using data from turbulent channel flow at a friction Reynolds number at $5200$, our simulations accurately predict the behaviour of the wall model at arbitrary friction Reynolds numbers up to $1.0 \times 10^6$. In contradistinction with other models that use direct numerical simulation datasets, our physics-informed model requires data from very limited regions within the wall-bounded plane, reducing by three orders of magnitude the quantity of data needed for training. We also demonstrate that our model can handle data configurations when the near-wall grid is sparse. Our physics-informed neural network approach opens up the possibility of employing LBM in combination with highly specific and therefore much more limited quantities of macroscopic data, substantially facilitating the investigation of a wide-range of turbulent flow applications at very large scale.