Thermal Performance in Convection Flow of Nanofluids Using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

This study develops a geometry adaptive, physical field predictor for the combined forced and natural convection flow of a nanofluid in horizontal single or double-inner cylinder annular pipes with various inner cylinder sizes and placements based on deep learning. The predictor is built with a convolutional-deconvolutional structure, where the input is the annulus cross-section geometry and the output is the temperature and the Nusselt number for the nanofluid-filled annulus. Profiting from the proven ability of dealing with pixel-like data, the convolutional neural network (CNN)-based predictor enables an accurate end-to-end mapping from the geometry input and the desired nanofluid physical field. Taking the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculation as the basis of our approach, the obtained results show that the average accuracy of the predicted temperature field and the coefficient of determination R2 are more than 99.9% and 0.998 accurate for single-inner cylinder nanofluid-filled annulus; while for the more complex case of double-inner cylinder, the results are still very close, higher than 99.8% and 0.99, respectively. Furthermore, the predictor takes only 0.038 s for each nanofluid field prediction, four orders of magnitude faster than the numerical simulation. The high accuracy and the fast speed estimation of the proposed predictor show the great potential of this approach to perform efficient inner cylinder configuration design and optimization for nanofluid-filled annulus.