Prediction of Turbulent Boundary Layer Flow Dynamics with Transformers

Time-marching of turbulent flow fields is computationally expensive using traditional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solvers. Machine Learning (ML) techniques can be used as an acceleration strategy to offload a few time-marching steps of a CFD solver. In this study, the Transformer (TR) architecture, which has been widely used in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community for prediction and generative tasks, is utilized to predict future velocity flow fields in an actuated Turbulent Boundary Layer (TBL) flow. A unique data pre-processing step is proposed to reduce the dimensionality of the velocity fields, allowing the processing of full velocity fields of the actuated TBL flow while taking advantage of distributed training in a High Performance Computing (HPC) environment. The trained model is tested at various prediction times using the Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) method. It is found that under five future prediction time steps with the TR, the model is able to achieve a relative Frobenius norm error of less than 5%, compared to fields predicted with a Large Eddy Simulation (LES). Finally, a computational study shows that the TR achieves a significant speed-up, offering computational savings approximately 53 times greater than those of the baseline LES solver. This study demonstrates one of the first applications of TRs on actuated TBL flow intended towards reducing the computational effort of time-marching. The application of this model is envisioned in a coupled manner with the LES solver to provide few time-marching steps, which will accelerate the overall computational process.