Super-resolution reconstruction of turbulent flows with a transformer-based deep learning framework

Abstract

Details of flow field are highly relevant to understand the mechanism of turbulence, but obtaining high-resolution turbulence often requires enormous computing resources. Although the super-resolution reconstruction of turbulent flow fields is an efficient way to obtain the details, the traditional interpolation methods are difficult to reconstruct small-scale structures, and the results are too smooth. In this paper, based on the transformer backbone architecture, we present a super-resolution transformer for turbulence to reconstruct turbulent flow fields with high quality. It is supervised and has a broader perceptual field for better extraction of deep-level features. The model is applied to forced isotropic turbulence and turbulent channel flow dataset, and the reconstructed instantaneous flow fields are comprehensively compared and analyzed. The results show that SRTT can recover the turbulent flow fields with high spatial resolution and capture small-scale details. It can obtain either the isotropic or the anisotropic turbulent properties even in complex flow configurations.