Simulation of multi-species flow and heat transfer using physics-informed neural networks

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) in simulating multi-species flow and heat transfer, showing improved conservation and accuracy over traditional methods in a 2D humidification problem.

Contribution

The study introduces segregated-network PINNs for multi-species flow simulation, achieving lower loss and better conservation than single-network PINNs, and extends to parameterized surrogate modeling.

Findings

Segregated-network PINNs outperform single-network PINNs with 62% lower loss.

Segregated PINNs better conserve species mass across the domain.

PINNs achieve approximately 7.5% error in velocity and temperature predictions.

Abstract

In the present work, single- and segregated-network PINN architectures are applied to predict momentum, species and temperature distributions of a dry air humidification problem in a simple 2D rectangular domain. The created PINN models account for variable fluid properties, species- and heat-diffusion and convection. Both the mentioned PINN architectures were trained using different hyperparameter settings, such as network width and depth to find the best-performing configuration. It is shown that the segregated-network PINN approach results in on-average 62% lower losses when compared to the single-network PINN architecture for the given problem. Furthermore, the single-network variant struggled to ensure species mass conservation in different areas of the computational domain, whereas, the segregated approach successfully maintained species conservation. The PINN predicted velocity, temperature and species profiles for a given set of boundary conditions were compared to results generated using OpenFOAM software. Both the single- and segregated-network PINN models produced accurate results for temperature and velocity profiles, with average percentage difference relative to the CFD results of approximately 7.5% for velocity and 8% for temperature. The mean error percentages for the species mass fractions are 9\% for the single-network model and 1.5% for the segregated-network approach. To showcase the applicability of PINNs for surrogate modelling of multi-species problems, a parameterised version of the segregated-network PINN is trained which could produce results for different water vapour inlet velocities. The normalised mean absolute percentage errors, relative to the OpenFOAM results, across three predicted cases for velocity and temperature are approximately 7.5% and 2.4% for water vapour mass fraction.