Physics-informed neural networks modeling for systems with moving immersed boundaries: application to an unsteady flow past a plunging foil

Abstract: Recently, physics informed neural networks (PINNs) have been explored extensively for solving various forward and inverse problems and facilitating querying applications in fluid mechanics applications. However, work on PINNs for unsteady flows past moving bodies, such as flapping wings is scarce. Earlier studies mostly relied on transferring to a body attached frame of reference which is restrictive towards handling multiple moving bodies or deforming structures. Hence, in the present work, an immersed boundary aware framework has been explored for developing surrogate models for unsteady flows past moving bodies. Specifically, simultaneous pressure recovery and velocity reconstruction from Immersed boundary method (IBM) simulation data has been investigated. While, efficacy of velocity reconstruction has been tested against the fine resolution IBM data, as a step further, the pressure recovered was compared with that of an arbitrary Lagrange Eulerian (ALE) based solver. Under this framework, two PINN variants, (i) a moving-boundary-enabled standard Navier-Stokes based PINN (MB-PINN), and, (ii) a moving-boundary-enabled IBM based PINN (MB-IBM-PINN) have been formulated. A fluid-solid partitioning of the physics losses in MB-IBM-PINN has been allowed, in order to investigate the effects of solid body points while training. This enables MB-IBM-PINN to match with the performance of MB-PINN under certain loss weighting conditions. MB-PINN is found to be superior to MB-IBM-PINN when {\it a priori} knowledge of the solid body position and velocity are available. To improve the data efficiency of MB-PINN, a physics based data sampling technique has also been investigated. It is observed that a suitable combination of physics constraint relaxation and physics based sampling can achieve a model performance comparable to the case of using all the data points, under a fixed training budget.