A co-kurtosis PCA based dimensionality reduction with nonlinear reconstruction using neural networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a nonlinear reconstruction approach using neural networks combined with co-kurtosis PCA for effective low-dimensional modeling of turbulent reacting flows, outperforming traditional PCA in capturing complex chemical dynamics.

Contribution

It presents a novel combination of co-kurtosis PCA with neural network-based nonlinear reconstruction, improving low-dimensional representations of thermo-chemical states in turbulent flows.

Findings

CoK-PCA with neural network reconstruction accurately captures reaction zone dynamics.

The method outperforms traditional PCA in reconstructing species production and heat release rates.

Robustness demonstrated across multiple combustion datasets.

Abstract

For turbulent reacting flows, identification of low-dimensional representations of the thermo-chemical state space is vitally important, primarily to significantly reduce the computational cost of device-scale simulations. Principal component analysis (PCA), and its variants, is a widely employed class of methods. Recently, an alternative technique that focuses on higher-order statistical interactions, co-kurtosis PCA (CoK-PCA), has been shown to effectively provide a low-dimensional representation by capturing the stiff chemical dynamics associated with spatiotemporally localized reaction zones. While its effectiveness has only been demonstrated based on a priori analysis with linear reconstruction, in this work, we employ nonlinear techniques to reconstruct the full thermo-chemical state and evaluate the efficacy of CoK-PCA compared to PCA. Specifically, we combine a CoK-PCA/PCA based dimensionality reduction (encoding) with an artificial neural network (ANN) based reconstruction (decoding) and examine a priori the reconstruction errors of the thermo-chemical state. In addition, we evaluate the errors in species production rates and heat release rates that are nonlinear functions of the reconstructed state as a measure of the overall accuracy of the dimensionality reduction technique. We employ four datasets to assess CoK-PCA/PCA coupled with ANN-based reconstruction: a homogeneous reactor for autoignition of an ethylene/air mixture that has conventional single-stage ignition kinetics, a dimethyl ether (DME)/air mixture which has two-stage ignition kinetics, a one-dimensional freely propagating premixed ethylene/air laminar flame, and a two-dimensional homogeneous charge compression ignition of ethanol. The analyses demonstrate the robustness of the CoK-PCA based low-dimensional manifold with ANN reconstruction in accurately capturing the data, specifically from the reaction zones.