Three-dimensional ESRGAN for super-resolution reconstruction of turbulent flows with tricubic interpolation-based transfer learning

Turbulence is a complicated phenomenon because of its chaotic behavior with multiple spatiotemporal scales. Turbulence also has irregularity and diffusivity, making predicting and reconstructing turbulence more challenging. This study proposes a deep-learning approach to reconstruct three-dimensional (3D) high-resolution turbulent flows from spatially limited data using a 3D enhanced super-resolution generative adversarial networks (3D-ESRGAN). In addition, a novel transfer-learning method based on tricubic interpolation is employed. Turbulent channel flow data at friction Reynolds numbers Reτ = 180 and Reτ = 500 were generated by direct numerical simulation (DNS) and used to estimate the performance of the deep-learning model as well as that of tricubic interpolation-based transfer learning. The results, including instantaneous velocity fields and turbulence statistics, show that the reconstructed high-resolution data agree well with the reference DNS data. The findings also indicate that the proposed 3D-ESRGAN can reconstruct 3D high-resolution turbulent flows even with limited training data.