Toward accelerated data-driven Rayleigh–Bénard convection simulations

A hybrid data-driven/finite volume method for 2D and 3D thermal convective flows is introduced. The approach relies on a single-step loss, convolutional neural network that is active only in the near-wall region of the flow. We demonstrate that the method significantly reduces errors in the prediction of the heat flux over the long-time horizon and increases pointwise accuracy in coarse simulations, when compared to direct computations on the same grids with and without a traditional subgrid model. We trace the success of our machine learning model to the choice of the training procedure, incorporating both the temporal flow development and distributional bias.