Reconstruction of three-dimensional turbulent flows from sparse and noisy planar measurements: A weight-sharing neural network approach

Abstract: This paper proposes a method for reconstructing three-dimensional turbulent flows from sparse measurements without the need for ground truth data during training. A weight-sharing network is developed to infer the full flow fields from measurements of velocity sampled at three planes and boundary pressure at one additional plane, inspired by experimental configurations. The weight-sharing network shares identical parameters along homogeneous directions, which results in efficient data utilization and reduced computational memory requirements. First, we compare the weight-sharing network to the PC-DualConvNet, adapted from prior work, by reconstructing a 3D Kolmogorov flow from noise-free measurements with a snapshot-enforced loss. Both networks accurately recover time-averaged 3D flow fields and the correct energy spectrum up to wavenumber 10. The weight-sharing network has the ability to infer flow structures distant from measurement planes. Second, we carry out reconstruction from measurements corrupted with white noise (SNR 15) using a mean-enforced loss. We show that, for the weight-sharing network, validation sensor loss on unseen data decreases with training sensor loss -- unlike PC-DualConvNet. This shows improved generalization and that training sensor loss estimates generalization error. The weight-sharing network offers good generalization, parameter efficiency, and hyperparameter robustness. The proposed method opens the possibility of three-dimensional flow reconstruction from experiments.