Soledad Le Clainche, Esteban Ferrer, Sam Gibson et al.
This review covers the new developments in machine learning (ML) that are impacting the multi-disciplinary area of aerospace engineering, including fundamental fluid dynamics (experimental and numerical), aerodynamics, acoustics, combustion and structural health monitoring. We review the state of the art, gathering the advantages and challenges of ML methods across different aerospace disciplines and provide our view on future opportunities. The basic concepts and the most relevant strategies for ML are presented together with the most relevant applications in aerospace engineering, revealing that ML is improving aircraft performance and that these techniques will have a large impact in the near future.
Adrián Corrochano, Rodolfo S. M. Freitas, Alessandro Parente et al.
In this work, a new hybrid predictive Reduced Order Model (ROM) is proposed to solve reacting flow problems. This algorithm is based on a dimensionality reduction using Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) combined with deep learning architectures. The number of degrees of freedom is reduced from thousands of temporal points to a few POD modes with their corresponding temporal coefficients. Two different deep learning architectures have been tested to predict the temporal coefficients, based on recursive (RNN) and convolutional (CNN) neural networks. From each architecture, different models have been created to understand the behavior of each parameter of the neural network. Results show that these architectures are able to predict the temporal coefficients of the POD modes, as well as the whole snapshots. The RNN shows lower prediction error for all the variables analyzed. The model was also found capable of predicting more complex simulations showing transfer learning capabilities.
León Mata, Rodrigo Abadía-Heredia, Manuel Lopez-Martin et al.
This work aims to improve fuel chamber injectors' performance in turbofan engines, thus implying improved performance and reduction of pollutants. This requires the development of models that allow real-time prediction and improvement of the fuel/air mixture. However, the work carried out to date involves using experimental data (complicated to measure) or the numerical resolution of the complete problem (computationally prohibitive). The latter involves the resolution of a system of partial differential equations (PDE). These problems make difficult to develop a real-time prediction tool. Therefore, in this work, we propose using machine learning in conjunction with (complementarily cheaper) single-phase flow numerical simulations in the presence of tangential discontinuities to estimate the mixing process in two-phase flows. In this meaning we study the application of two proposed neural network (NN) models as PDE surrogate models. Where the future dynamics is predicted by the NN, given some preliminary information. We show the low computational cost required by these models, both in their training and inference phases. We also show how NN training can be improved by reducing data complexity through a modal decomposition technique called higher order dynamic mode decomposition (HODMD), which identifies the main structures inside flow dynamics and reconstructs the original flow using only these main structures. This reconstruction has the same number of samples and spatial dimension as the original flow, but with a less complex dynamics and preserving its main features. The core idea of this work is to test the limits of applicability of deep learning models to data forecasting in complex fluid dynamics problems. Generalization capabilities of the models are demonstrated by using the same NN architectures to forecast the future dynamics of four different two-phase flows.
Francisco Giral, Ignacio Gómez, Soledad Le Clainche
The proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in controlled airspace presents significant risks, including potential collisions, disruptions to air traffic, and security threats. Ensuring the safe and efficient operation of airspace, particularly in urban environments and near critical infrastructure, necessitates effective methods to intercept unauthorized or non-cooperative UAVs. This work addresses the critical need for robust, adaptive systems capable of managing such threats through the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL). We present a novel approach utilizing RL to train fixed-wing UAV pursuer agents for intercepting dynamic evader targets. Our methodology explores both model-based and model-free RL algorithms, specifically DreamerV3, Truncated Quantile Critics (TQC), and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC). The training and evaluation of these algorithms were conducted under diverse scenarios, including unseen evasion strategies and environmental perturbations. Our approach leverages high-fidelity flight dynamics simulations to create realistic training environments. This research underscores the importance of developing intelligent, adaptive control systems for UAV interception, significantly contributing to the advancement of secure and efficient airspace management. It demonstrates the potential of RL to train systems capable of autonomously achieving these critical tasks.
Rodrigo Abadía-Heredia, Manuel Lopez-Martin, Soledad Le Clainche
This work presents, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the first generalizable and fully data-driven adaptive framework designed to stabilize deep learning (DL) autoregressive forecasting models over long time horizons, with the goal of reducing the computational cost required in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations.The proposed methodology alternates between two phases: (i) predicting the evolution of the flow field over a selected time interval using a trained DL model, and (ii) updating the model with newly generated CFD data when stability degrades, thus maintaining accurate long-term forecasting. This adaptive retraining strategy ensures robustness while avoiding the accumulation of predictive errors typical in autoregressive models. The framework is validated across three increasingly complex flow regimes, from laminar to turbulent, demonstrating from 30 \% to 95 \% reduction in computational cost without compromising physical consistency or accuracy. Its entirely data-driven nature makes it easily adaptable to a wide range of time-dependent simulation problems. The code implementing this methodology is available as open-source and it will be integrated into the upcoming release of the ModelFLOWs-app.
Andrés Bell-Navas, Nourelhouda Groun, María Villalba-Orero et al.
Heart diseases are the main international cause of human defunction. According to the WHO, nearly 18 million people decease each year because of heart diseases. Also considering the increase of medical data, much pressure is put on the health industry to develop systems for early and accurate heart disease recognition. In this work, an automatic cardiac pathology recognition system based on a novel deep learning framework is proposed, which analyses in real-time echocardiography video sequences. The system works in two stages. The first one transforms the data included in a database of echocardiography sequences into a machine-learning-compatible collection of annotated images which can be used in the training stage of any kind of machine learning-based framework, and more specifically with deep learning. This includes the use of the Higher Order Dynamic Mode Decomposition (HODMD) algorithm, for the first time to the authors' knowledge, for both data augmentation and feature extraction in the medical field. The second stage is focused on building and training a Vision Transformer (ViT), barely explored in the related literature. The ViT is adapted for an effective training from scratch, even with small datasets. The designed neural network analyses images from an echocardiography sequence to predict the heart state. The results obtained show the superiority of the proposed system and the efficacy of the HODMD algorithm, even outperforming pretrained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which are so far the method of choice in the literature.
Rodrigo Abadía-Heredia, Adrián Corrochano, Manuel Lopez-Martin et al.
This study investigates the generalization capabilities and robustness of purely deep learning (DL) models and hybrid models based on physical principles in fluid dynamics applications, specifically focusing on iteratively forecasting the temporal evolution of flow dynamics. Three autoregressive models were compared: a hybrid model (POD-DL) that combines proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) with a long-short term memory (LSTM) layer, a convolutional autoencoder combined with a convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM) layer and a variational autoencoder (VAE) combined with a ConvLSTM layer. These models were tested on two high-dimensional, nonlinear datasets representing the velocity field of flow past a circular cylinder in both laminar and turbulent regimes. The study used latent dimension methods, enabling a bijective reduction of high-dimensional dynamics into a lower-order space to facilitate future predictions. While the VAE and ConvLSTM models accurately predicted laminar flow, the hybrid POD-DL model outperformed the others across both laminar and turbulent flow regimes. This success is attributed to the model's ability to incorporate modal decomposition, reducing the dimensionality of the data, by a non-parametric method, and simplifying the forecasting component. By leveraging POD, the model not only gained insight into the underlying physics, improving prediction accuracy with less training data, but also reduce the number of trainable parameters as POD is non-parametric. The findings emphasize the potential of hybrid models, particularly those integrating modal decomposition and deep learning, in predicting complex flow dynamics.
Nourelhouda Groun, Maria Villalba-Orero, Lucia Casado-Martin et al.
In the realm of cardiovascular medicine, medical imaging plays a crucial role in accurately classifying cardiac diseases and making precise diagnoses. However, the field faces significant challenges when integrating data science techniques, as a significant volume of images is required for these techniques. As a consequence, it is necessary to investigate different avenues to overcome this challenge. In this contribution, we offer an innovative tool to conquer this limitation. In particular, we delve into the application of a well recognized method known as the EigenFaces approach to classify cardiac diseases. This approach was originally motivated for efficiently representing pictures of faces using principal component analysis, which provides a set of eigenvectors (aka eigenfaces), explaining the variation between face images. As this approach proven to be efficient for face recognition, it motivated us to explore its efficiency on more complicated data bases. In particular, we integrate this approach, with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to classify echocardiography images taken from mice in five distinct cardiac conditions (healthy, diabetic cardiomyopathy, myocardial infarction, obesity and TAC hypertension). Performing a preprocessing step inspired from the eigenfaces approach on the echocardiography datasets, yields sets of pod modes, which we will call eigenhearts. To demonstrate the proposed approach, we compare two testcases: (i) supplying the CNN with the original images directly, (ii) supplying the CNN with images projected into the obtained pod modes. The results show a substantial and noteworthy enhancement when employing SVD for pre-processing, with classification accuracy increasing by approximately 50%.
Arindam Sengupta, Rodrigo Abadía-Heredia, Ashton Hetherington et al.
Accurate modeling of the complex dynamics of fluid flows is a fundamental challenge in computational physics and engineering. This study presents an innovative integration of High-Order Singular Value Decomposition (HOSVD) with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architectures to address the complexities of reduced-order modeling (ROM) in fluid dynamics. HOSVD improves the dimensionality reduction process by preserving multidimensional structures, surpassing the limitations of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The methodology is tested across numerical and experimental data sets, including two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) cylinder wake flows, spanning both laminar and turbulent regimes. The emphasis is also on exploring how the depth and complexity of LSTM architectures contribute to improving predictive performance. Simpler architectures with a single dense layer effectively capture the periodic dynamics, demonstrating the network's ability to model non-linearities and chaotic dynamics. The addition of extra layers provides higher accuracy at minimal computational cost. These additional layers enable the network to expand its representational capacity, improving the prediction accuracy and reliability. The results demonstrate that HOSVD outperforms SVD in all tested scenarios, as evidenced by using different error metrics. Efficient mode truncation by HOSVD-based models enables the capture of complex temporal patterns, offering reliable predictions even in challenging, noise-influenced data sets. The findings underscore the adaptability and robustness of HOSVD-LSTM architectures, offering a scalable framework for modeling fluid dynamics.
Ashton Hetherington, Javier López Leonés, Soledad Le Clainche
This article introduces a novel methodology that integrates singular value decomposition (SVD) with a shallow linear neural network for forecasting high resolution fluid mechanics data. The method, termed LC-SVD-DLinear, combines a low-cost variant of singular value decomposition (LC-SVD) with the DLinear architecture, which decomposes the input features-specifically, the temporal coefficients-into trend and seasonality components, enabling a shallow neural network to capture the non-linear dynamics of the temporal data. This methodology uses under-resolved data, which can either be input directly into the hybrid model or downsampled from high resolution using two distinct techniques provided by the methodology. Working with under-resolved cases helps reduce the overall computational cost. Additionally, we present a variant of the method, LC-HOSVD-DLinear, which combines a low-cost version of the high-order singular value decomposition (LC-HOSVD) algorithm with the DLinear network, designed for high-order data. These approaches have been validated using two datasets: first, a numerical simulation of three-dimensional flow past a circular cylinder at $Re = 220$; and second, an experimental dataset of turbulent flow passing a circular cylinder at $Re = 2600$. The combination of these datasets demonstrates the robustness of the method. The forecasting and reconstruction results are evaluated through various error metrics, including uncertainty quantification. The work developed in this article will be included in the next release of ModelFLOWs-app
Nourelhouda Groun, Maria Villalba-Orero, Lucia Casado-Martin et al.
In this work, a data-driven, modal decomposition method, the higher order dynamic mode decomposition (HODMD), is combined with a convolutional neural network (CNN) in order to improve the classification accuracy of several cardiac diseases using echocardiography images. The HODMD algorithm is used first as feature extraction technique for the echocardiography datasets, taken from both healthy mice and mice afflicted by different cardiac diseases (Diabetic Cardiomyopathy, Obesity, TAC Hypertrophy and Myocardial Infarction). A total number of 130 echocardiography datasets are used in this work. The dominant features related to each cardiac disease were identified and represented by the HODMD algorithm as a set of DMD modes, which then are used as the input to the CNN. In a way, the database dimension was augmented, hence HODMD has been used, for the first time to the authors knowledge, for data augmentation in the machine learning framework. Six sets of the original echocardiography databases were hold out to be used as unseen data to test the performance of the CNN. In order to demonstrate the efficiency of the HODMD technique, two testcases are studied: the CNN is first trained using the original echocardiography images only, and second training the CNN using a combination of the original images and the DMD modes. The classification performance of the designed trained CNN shows that combining the original images with the DMD modes improves the results in all the testcases, as it improves the accuracy by up to 22%. These results show the great potential of using the HODMD algorithm as a data augmentation technique.
Hamidreza Eivazi, Soledad Le Clainche, Sergio Hoyas et al.
We propose a deep probabilistic-neural-network architecture for learning a minimal and near-orthogonal set of non-linear modes from high-fidelity turbulent-flow-field data useful for flow analysis, reduced-order modeling, and flow control. Our approach is based on $β$-variational autoencoders ($β$-VAEs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which allow us to extract non-linear modes from multi-scale turbulent flows while encouraging the learning of independent latent variables and penalizing the size of the latent vector. Moreover, we introduce an algorithm for ordering VAE-based modes with respect to their contribution to the reconstruction. We apply this method for non-linear mode decomposition of the turbulent flow through a simplified urban environment, where the flow-field data is obtained based on well-resolved large-eddy simulations (LESs). We demonstrate that by constraining the shape of the latent space, it is possible to motivate the orthogonality and extract a set of parsimonious modes sufficient for high-quality reconstruction. Our results show the excellent performance of the method in the reconstruction against linear-theory-based decompositions. Moreover, we compare our method with available AE-based models. We show the ability of our approach in the extraction of near-orthogonal modes that may lead to interpretability.