Physics-informed machine learning for combustion: A review (2509.03347v1)

Abstract: Physics-informed machine learning (PIML) represents an emerging paradigm that integrates various forms of physical knowledge into ML components, thereby enhancing the physical consistency of ML models compared to purely data-driven paradigms. The field of combustion, characterized by a rich foundation of physical laws and abundant data, is undergoing a transformation due to PIML. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of PIML for combustion, systematically outlining fundamental principles, significant contributions, key advancements, and available resources. The application of PIML in combustion is categorized into three domains: combustion chemical kinetics, combustion reacting flows, and other combustion-related problems. Additionally, current challenges, potential solutions, and practical guidelines for researchers and engineers will be discussed. A primary focus of this review is to demonstrate how combustion laws can be integrated into ML, either through soft or hard constraints, via loss functions or representation models, and within coordinate-to-variable or field-to-field paradigms. This paper shows that PIML offers a unified framework linking physics, model, and data in combustion--integrating physical knowledge in model-to-data simulation and reconstruction tasks, as well as data-to-model modeling tasks--resulting in enhanced data, improved physical models, and more reliable ML models. PIML for combustion presents significant opportunities for both the combustion and ML communities, encouraging greater collaboration and cross-disciplinary engagement.