Investigation of Numerical Diffusion in Aerodynamic Flow Simulations with Physics Informed Neural Networks

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are used for many air flow simulations including road vehicle aerodynamics. Numerical diffusion occurs when local flow direction is not aligned with the mesh lines and when there is a non-zero gradient of the dependent variable in the direction normal to the streamline direction. It has been observed that typical numerical discretization schemes for the Navier-Stokes equations such as first order upwinding produce very accurate solutions without numerical diffusion when the mesh is aligned with the streamline direction. On the other hand, numerical diffusion is maximized when the streamline direction is at an angle of 45° relative to the mesh line. Numerical diffusion can be reduced by mesh refinements such as aligning mesh lines along the local flow direction or by introducing higher order numerical schemes, which may introduce potential numerical instability or additional computational cost. A few test cases of a simple steady-state incompressible and inviscid air flow convection problem were used to investigate whether numerical diffusion occurs when using Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) that rely on automatic differentiation as opposed to numerical techniques used in traditional CFD solvers. Numerical diffusion was not observed when PINNs were used to solve the partial differential equation (PDE) for the simple convection problem irrespective of flow angle. ThePINN correctly simulated the streamwise upwinding, which has great potential to improve the accuracy of Navier-Stokes solvers.