A hierarchical autoencoder and temporal convolutional neural network reduced-order model for the turbulent wake of a three-dimensional bluff body

Abstract

We propose a novel reduced-order model and examine its applicability to the complex three-dimensional turbulent wake of a generic square-backed bluff body called the Ahmed body at the Reynolds number ReH = U∞H/ν = 9.2 × 104 (where U∞ is free-stream velocity, H the height of the body, and ν viscosity). Training datasets are obtained by large eddy simulation. The model reduction method consists of two components—a Visual Geometry Group (VGG)-based hierarchical autoencoder (H-VGG-AE) and a temporal convolutional neural network (TCN). The first step is to map the high-dimensional flow attributes into low-dimensional features, namely latent modes, which are employed as the input for the second step. The TCN is then trained to predict the low-dimensional features in a time series. We compare this method with a TCN based on proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), which utilizes time coefficients as the input in the second part. It turns out that the H-VGG-AE has a lower reconstruction error than POD when the number of latent modes is relatively small in the first part. As the number of latent modes increases, POD exceeds in the performance of model reduction. However, the H-VGG-AE-based TCN is still more effective in terms of spatiotemporal predictions because it has a lower prediction error and costs much less time.