A graph neural network-based framework to identify flow phenomena on unstructured meshes

Abstract

Driven by the abundant data generated from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, machine learning (ML) methods surpass the deterministic criteria on flow phenomena identification in the way that they are independent of a case-by-case threshold by combining the flow field properties and the topological distribution of the phenomena. The current most popular and successful ML models based on convolutional neural networks are limited to structured meshes and unable to directly digest the data generated from unstructured meshes, which are more widely used in real industrial CFD simulations. We proposed a framework based on graph neural networks with the proposed fast Gaussian mixture model as the convolution kernel and U-Net architecture to detect flow phenomena based on a graph hierarchy generated by the algebraic multigrid method embedded in the open-source CFD solver, code_saturne. We demonstrate the superiority of the proposed kernel and U-Net architecture, along with the generality of the framework to unstructured mesh and unseen case, on detecting the vortices once trained on a single backward-facing step case. Our proposed framework can be trivially extended to detect more flow phenomena in three dimensional cases, which is ongoing work.