Reconstructing turbulent velocity and pressure fields from under-resolved noisy particle tracks using physics-informed neural networks

Volume-resolving imaging techniques are rapidly advancing progress in experimental fluid mechanics. However, reconstructing the full and structured Eulerian velocity and pressure fields from under-resolved and noisy particle tracks obtained experimentally remains a significant challenge. We adopt and characterize a method based on Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). In this approach, the network is regularized by the Navier-Stokes equations to interpolate the velocity data and simultaneously determine the pressure field. We compare this approach to the state-of-the-art Constrained Cost Minimization method Agarwal et al. (2021). Using data from direct numerical simulations and various types of synthetically generated particle tracks, we show that PINNs are able to accurately reconstruct both velocity and pressure even in regions with low particle density and small accelerations. We analyze both the root-mean-square error of the reconstructions as well their energy spectra. PINNs are also robust against increasing the distance between particles and the noise in the measurements, when studied under synthetic and experimental conditions. Both the synthetic and experimental datasets used correspond to moderate Reynolds number flows.