Physics informed wavelet Fourier representation for multiscale fluid dynamics

Abstract

Multiscale fluid flows often contain localized flow structures, such as viscous shock layers, wet-dry fronts, steady viscous wakes, decaying vortical structures, and vortex-shedding patterns, whose accurate prediction requires the simultaneous preservation of global conservation trends and small-scale gradients. This study examines these flow-physics requirements through a physics-informed wavelet-Fourier (PIWF) representation for multiscale fluid dynamics. Instead of relying on a single monolithic neural approximator, the formulation separates two complementary components of the flow field within a physics-informed neural representation: long-range coherent modes through a Fourier-basis branch and localized steep-gradient or vortical features through a compactly supported wavelet branch. The outputs are fused with a residual multilayer perceptron using channel attention, and the governing equations, initial conditions, and boundary conditions are imposed directly through the physics-informed loss. The model is assessed on five canonical fluid-dynamics problems: Burgers' equation, the shallow water equations, Kovasznay flow, Taylor--Green vortex flow, and two-dimensional cylinder wake flow. The results show that PIWF improves the resolution of shock-like gradients, wet--dry interfaces, steady wake fields, decaying vortical structures, vorticity extrema, and broadband wake spectra relative to standard physics-informed neural networks and physics-informed Kolmogorov--Arnold networks. These findings indicate that a wavelet-Fourier physics-informed representation can provide a useful route for analyzing multiscale flow phenomena when high-fidelity interior reference data are limited or unavailable.