Prediction of wall-bounded turbulence from wall quantities using convolutional neural networks

A fully-convolutional neural-network model is used to predict the streamwise velocity fields at several wall-normal locations by taking as input the streamwise and spanwise wall-shear-stress planes in a turbulent open channel flow. The training data are generated by performing a direct numerical simulation (DNS) at a friction Reynolds number of $Re{\tau}=180$. Various networks are trained for predictions at three inner-scaled locations ($y⁺ = 15,~30,~50$) and for different time steps between input samples $\Delta t^{+}{s}$. The inherent non-linearity of the neural-network model enables a better prediction capability than linear methods, with a lower error in both the instantaneous flow fields and turbulent statistics. Using a dataset with higher $\Delta t^+_{s}$ improves the generalization at all the considered wall-normal locations, as long as the network capacity is sufficient to generalize over the dataset. The use of a multiple-output network, with parallel dedicated branches for two wall-normal locations, does not provide any improvement over two separated single-output networks, other than a moderate saving in training time. Training time can be effectively reduced, by a factor of 4, via a transfer learning method that initializes the network parameters using the optimized parameters of a previously-trained network.