Latent-space Physics: Towards Learning the Temporal Evolution of Fluid Flow

Steffen Wiewel, Moritz Becher, Nils Thuerey

Published 2018-02-27Version 1

Our work explores methods for the data-driven inference of temporal evolutions of physical functions with deep learning techniques. More specifically, we target fluid flow problems, and we propose a novel LSTM-based approach to predict the changes of the pressure field over time. The central challenge in this context is the high dimensionality of Eulerian space-time data sets. Key for arriving at a feasible algorithm is a technique for dimensionality reduction based on convolutional neural networks, as well as a special architecture for temporal prediction. We demonstrate that dense 3D+time functions of physics system can be predicted with neural networks, and we arrive at a neural-network based simulation algorithm with significant practical speed-ups. We demonstrate the capabilities of our method with a series of complex liquid simulations, and with a set of single-phase buoyancy simulations. With a set of trained networks, our method is more than two orders of magnitudes faster than a traditional pressure solver. Additionally, we present and discuss a series of detailed evaluations for the different components of our algorithm.