Shilaj Baral

Minseo Lee, Seongmin Oh, Chaehyeon Song et al.

Real-time thermal-hydraulic simulation is essential for digital twin (DT) technology that supports the safe and efficient operation of small modular reactors (SMRs). Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) provides high-fidelity flow analysis, but its computational cost prevents direct use in DT applications. AI-based surrogate modeling has been actively investigated to address this limitation, yet neural operator--based surrogates for CFD-level transient analysis of SMR-specific geometries have not been reported. This study presents an integrated framework that combines a reduced-order model (ROM) with neural operators, applied to the helical coil steam generator (HCSG) of the System-integrated Modular Advanced Reactor (SMART). Two ROM strategies tailored to each CFD data type were compared, an MLP-based autoencoder (AE) for unstructured mesh data and a convolutional autoencoder (CAE) for structured mesh data, and each was coupled with the deep operator network (DeepONet) to construct the latent DeepONet (L-DeepONet). The Fourier neural operator (FNO) was additionally adopted for comparison. A multi-scale technique was incorporated into both frameworks to mitigate spectral bias and improve the prediction of Kármán vortex streets developing inside the HCSG. The multi-scale L-DeepONet captured the instantaneous periodic vortex dynamics in both velocity and pressure fields, while the FNO and its multi-scale variant predicted the time-averaged mean flow and provided reliable pressure drop estimates. These complementary characteristics provide a practical model-selection guideline that links each architecture to specific DT objectives based on CFD data type and the required level of flow resolution.

Joongoo Jeon, Jean Rabault, Joel Vasanth et al.

Flow control is key to maximize energy efficiency in a wide range of applications. However, traditional flow-control methods face significant challenges in addressing non-linear systems and high-dimensional data, limiting their application in realistic energy systems. This study advances deep-reinforcement-learning (DRL) methods for flow control, particularly focusing on integrating group-invariant networks and positional encoding into DRL architectures. Our methods leverage multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to exploit policy invariance in space, in combination with group-invariant networks to ensure local symmetry invariance. Additionally, a positional encoding inspired by the transformer architecture is incorporated to provide location information to the agents, mitigating action constraints from strict invariance. The proposed methods are verified using a case study of Rayleigh-Bénard convection, where the goal is to minimize the Nusselt number Nu. The group-invariant neural networks (GI-NNs) show faster convergence compared to the base MARL, achieving better average policy performance. The GI-NNs not only cut DRL training time in half but also notably enhance learning reproducibility. Positional encoding further enhances these results, effectively reducing the minimum Nu and stabilizing convergence. Interestingly, group invariant networks specialize in improving learning speed and positional encoding specializes in improving learning quality. These results demonstrate that choosing a suitable feature-representation method according to the purpose as well as the characteristics of each control problem is essential. We believe that the results of this study will not only inspire novel DRL methods with invariant and unique representations, but also provide useful insights for industrial applications.

Sangam Khanal, Shilaj Baral, Joongoo Jeon

CFD acceleration for virtual nuclear reactors or digital twin technology is a primary goal in the nuclear industry. This study compares advanced convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures for accelerating unsteady computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations using small datasets based on a challenging natural convection flow dataset. The advanced architectures such as autoencoders, UNet, and ConvLSTM-UNet, were evaluated under identical conditions to determine their predictive accuracy and robustness in autoregressive time-series predictions. ConvLSTM-UNet consistently outperformed other models, particularly in difference value calculation, achieving lower maximum errors and stable residuals. However, error accumulation remains a challenge, limiting reliable predictions to approximately 10 timesteps. This highlights the need for enhanced strategies to improve long-term prediction stability. The novelty of this work lies in its fair comparison of state-of-the-art CNN models within the RePIT framework, demonstrating their potential for accelerating CFD simulations while identifying limitations under small data conditions. Future research will focus on exploring alternative models, such as graph neural networks and implicit neural representations. These efforts aim to develop a robust hybrid approach for long-term unsteady CFD acceleration, contributing to practical applications in virtual nuclear reactor.

Shilaj Baral, Youngkyu Lee, Sangam Khanal et al.

Purely data-driven surrogates for fluid dynamics often fail catastrophically from error accumulation, while existing hybrid methods have lacked the automation and robustness for practical use. To solve this, we developed XRePIT, a novel hybrid simulation strategy that synergizes machine learning (ML) acceleration with solver-based correction. We specifically designed our method to be fully automated and physics-aware, ensuring the stability and practical applicability that previous approaches lacked. We demonstrate that this new design overcomes long-standing barriers, achieving the first stable, accelerated rollouts for over 10,000 timesteps. The method also generalizes robustly to unseen boundary conditions and, crucially, scales to 3D flows. Our approach delivers speedups up to 4.98$\times$ while maintaining high physical fidelity, resolving thermal fields with relative errors of ~1E-3 and capturing low magnitude velocity dynamics with errors below 1E-2 ms-1. This work thus establishes a mature and scalable hybrid method, paving the way for its use in real-world engineering.