SPINN: An Optimal Self-Supervised Physics-Informed Neural Network Framework

Abstract: A surrogate model is developed to predict the convective heat transfer coefficient of liquid sodium (Na) flow within rectangular miniature heat sinks. Initially, kernel-based machine learning techniques and shallow neural network are applied to a dataset with 87 Nusselt numbers for liquid sodium in rectangular miniature heat sinks. Subsequently, a self-supervised physics-informed neural network and transfer learning approach are used to increase the estimation performance. In the self-supervised physics-informed neural network, an additional layer determines the weight the of physics in the loss function to balance data and physics based on their uncertainty for a better estimation. For transfer learning, a shallow neural network trained on water is adapted for use with Na. Validation results show that the self-supervised physics-informed neural network successfully estimate the heat transfer rates of Na with an error margin of approximately +8%. Using only physics for regression, the error remains between 5% to 10%. Other machine learning methods specify the prediction mostly within +8%. High-fidelity modeling of turbulent forced convection of liquid metals using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is both time-consuming and computationally expensive. Therefore, machine learning based models offer a powerful alternative tool for the design and optimization of liquid-metal-cooled miniature heat sinks.