A machine-learned probability distribution in the phase space of turbulent channel flow for synthetic turbulence and flow reconstruction

Abstract

Although a complete characterisation of the probability distribution in the phase space of turbulent flows remains elusive, accurately sampling this distribution is essential for both synthetic turbulence generation and turbulent flow reconstruction. Motivated by these applications, we examine to what extent a machine-learned distribution can approximate the physical invariant distribution of turbulent channel flow at $\mathrm{Re}_τ=180$. We assess three important properties of the approximation: physical ensemble statistics, consistent conditional sampling, and dynamical invariance. To this end, a flow-based generative model is trained on a minimal conditional flow unit, which we define as the smallest domain outside which conditional fields, given a single observation at the domain centre, are indistinguishable from unconditional fields in terms of mean-square discrepancy to other conditional fields. We also introduce a consistent procedure for sampling from the conditional learned distribution. Comparisons with direct numerical simulation show that synthetic turbulent fields reproduce key statistical and dynamical features of turbulence, including intermittency and nonlinear energy transfer. The consistency of conditional sampling is demonstrated in a flow reconstruction problem, and subsequently used to generate synthetic turbulent velocity fields on a large domain. When adopted as initial conditions in direct numerical simulations, these fields yield physical and statistically stationary ensemble statistics, indicating that the learned distribution provides a good approximation to the natural distribution of the turbulent dynamical system.