Predicting pressure fields from incomplete velocity fields based on deep convolutional neural network

Acquisition of an instantaneous pressure field in a flow field is essential for experimental fluid dynamics research because pressure is associated with various flow phenomena. Machine learning has performed well in various fluid mechanics studies in recent years due to its nonlinearity. In this paper, we use the machine learning method to predict the pressure fields from incomplete velocity fields while reconstructing the missing velocity information, as exemplified by the stationary circular cylinder flow and circular cylinder undergoing forced oscillating problems, in which the incompleteness of the velocity field is caused by the optical path occlusion in experiments. We propose a network model based on convolutional neural networks. The experimental results show that the error of machine learning methods is around 4%, and even if the resolution of the training set is reduced, it does not affect the prediction accuracy of the network. For statistical averaging of prediction results, the network has high accuracy in predicting first-order quantities, but its ability to predict second-order quantities is limited. We also explore the effects of the amount of noise on the performance of networks. When applying the model to the forced oscillating cylinder problem, we use transfer learning to train the network given the similarity of the two problems, and the training error yields faster convergence and more minor convergence results. In addition to this, we use flow field data with a single vibration frequency to construct a single dataset, and flow field data with multiple vibration frequencies to construct a mixed dataset, and study the effect of different datasets on the prediction accuracy, which shows that it is difficult for neural networks to achieve both accuracy and generalization.