Enhancement of Reflood Test Prediction by Integrating Machine Learning and Data Assimilation Technique

Abstract

Data assimilation (DA) was revealed as a highly efficient approach to enhance the prediction’s accuracy, demonstrating the reliability of the simulation through uncertainty quantification analysis. However, in the numerical simulations, most of the tasks are highly nonlinear relationships between the parameters that directly affect the efficiency of the DA such as the large search space dimension, resulting in significant computational costs. This limitation can be overcome by implementing machine learning (ML) predictions that can efficiently expand the DA search space. Therefore, this study is aimed at enhancing the performance of DA by integrating ML and DA (IMD), proposing a new method to overcome the stand-alone DA limitations. The approach involved implementing a stand-alone DA using the multidimensional analysis of reactor safety (MARS) code to enhance the prediction of reflood tests. The output datasets obtained from the stand-alone DA were then used to train the deep neural networks (DNNs), and the accuracy of the DNN’s prediction was thoroughly evaluated with varying dataset sizes. This DNN subsequently can predict the enormous unobserved samples, enabling the identification and investigation of the prospective candidates for the subsequent DA process. The results demonstrated that the stand-alone DA achieved an accuracy enhancement of up to 41.3% in reflood test predictions, while the IMD yielded even more significant improvements, with a performance enhancement of 47.0%. These findings reveal that the IMD approach outperformed the stand-alone DA approach, particularly in the case of high flooding rate tests. In this context, the proposed integrating system can effectively overcome the high computational cost and enhance the performance of stand-alone DA.