A novel spatial–temporal prediction method for the effects of fish movement on flow field based on hybrid deep neural network

In the fish passage facility design, understanding the coupled effects of hydrodynamics on fish behaviour is particularly important. The flow field caused by fish movement however are usually obtained via time-consuming transient numerical simulation. Hence, a hybrid deep neural network (HDNN) approach is designed to predict the unsteady flow field around fish. The basic architecture of HDNN includes the UNet convolution (UConv) module and the bidirectional convolutional long-short term memory (BiConvLSTM) module. Specifically, the UConv module extracts crucial features from the flow field graph, while the BiConvLSTM module learns the evolution of low-dimensional spatio-temporal features for prediction. The numerical results showcase that the HDNN achieves accurate multi-step rolling predictions of the effect of fish movement on flow fields under different tail-beat frequency conditions. Specifically, the average and standard deviation of PSNR and SSIM for the proposed HDNN model for 60 time-step rolling predictions on the entire sequences of four test sets being respectively larger than 34 dB and 0.9. The HDNN delivers a speedup of over 130 times compared to the numerical simulator. Moreover, the HDNN demonstrates commendable generalisation capabilities, enabling the prediction of spatial–temporal evolution within unsteady flow fields even at unknown tail-beat frequencies.