Applicability of Convolutional Neural Network for Estimation of Turbulent Diffusion Distance from Source Point

For locating the source of leaking gas in various engineering fields, several issues remain in the immediate estimation of the location of diffusion sources from limited observation data, because of the nonlinearity of turbulence. This study investigated the practical applicability of diffusion source-location prediction using a convolutional neural network (CNN) from leaking gas instantaneous distribution images captured by infrared cameras. We performed direct numerical simulation of a turbulent flow past a cylinder to provide training and test images, which are scalar concentration distribution fields integrated along the view direction, mimicking actual camera images. We discussed the effects of the direction in which the leaking gas flows into the camera’s view and the distance between the camera and the leaking gas on the accuracy of inference. A single learner created by all images provided an inference accuracy exceeding 85%, regardless of the inflow direction or the distance between the camera and the leaking gas within the trained range. This indicated that, with sufficient training images, a high-inference accuracy can be achieved, regardless of the direction of gas leakage or the distance between the camera and the leaking gas.