Feasibility Study of CNNs and MLPs for Radiation Heat Transfer in 2-D Furnaces with Spectrally Participative Gases
This work addresses computational efficiency for industrial furnace simulations, but it is incremental as it adapts existing neural network methods to a specific domain.
The study tackled reducing computational cost in radiation heat transfer simulations for 2-D furnaces with spectrally participative gases by developing CNN and MLP surrogate models, achieving significant speedup with industrially acceptable errors and showing CNN outperforms MLP in precision and robustness.
Aiming to reduce the computational cost of numerical simulations, a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) are introduced to build a surrogate model to approximate radiative heat transfer solutions in a 2-D walled domain with participative gases. The originality of this work lays in the adaptation of the inputs of the problem (gas and wall properties) in order to fit with the CNN architecture, more commonly used for image processing. Two precision datasets have been created with the classical solver, ICARUS2D, that uses the discrete transfer radiation method with the statistical narrow bands model. The performance of the CNN architecture is compared to a more classical MLP architecture in terms of speed and accuracy. Thanks to Optuna, all results are obtained using the optimized hyper parameters networks. The results show a significant speedup with industrially acceptable relative errors compared to the classical solver for both architectures. Additionally, the CNN outperforms the MLP in terms of precision and is more robust and stable to changes in hyper-parameters. A performance analysis on the dataset size of the samples have also been carried out to gain a deeper understanding of the model behavior.