Non-intrusive reduced order modeling of natural convection in porous media using convolutional autoencoders: comparison with linear subspace techniques

Natural convection in porous media is a highly nonlinear multiphysical problem relevant to many engineering applications (e.g., the process of $\mathrm{CO_2}$ sequestration). Here, we present a non-intrusive reduced order model of natural convection in porous media employing deep convolutional autoencoders for the compression and reconstruction and either radial basis function (RBF) interpolation or artificial neural networks (ANNs) for mapping parameters of partial differential equations (PDEs) on the corresponding nonlinear manifolds. To benchmark our approach, we also describe linear compression and reconstruction processes relying on proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) and ANNs. We present comprehensive comparisons among different models through three benchmark problems. The reduced order models, linear and nonlinear approaches, are much faster than the finite element model, obtaining a maximum speed-up of $7 \times 10^{6}$ because our framework is not bound by the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition; hence, it could deliver quantities of interest at any given time contrary to the finite element model. Our model's accuracy still lies within a mean squared error of 0.07 (two-order of magnitude lower than the maximum value of the finite element results) in the worst-case scenario. We illustrate that, in specific settings, the nonlinear approach outperforms its linear counterpart and vice versa. We hypothesize that a visual comparison between principal component analysis (PCA) or t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) could indicate which method will perform better prior to employing any specific compression strategy.

Non-intrusive reduced order modeling of poroelasticity of heterogeneous media based on a discontinuous Galerkin approximation

We present a non-intrusive model reduction framework for linear poroelasticity problems in heterogeneous porous media using proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) and neural networks, based on the usual offline-online paradigm. As the conductivity of porous media can be highly heterogeneous and span several orders of magnitude, we utilize the interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method as a full order solver to handle discontinuity and ensure local mass conservation during the offline stage. We then use POD as a data compression tool and compare the nested POD technique, in which time and uncertain parameter domains are compressed consecutively, to the classical POD method in which all domains are compressed simultaneously. The neural networks are finally trained to map the set of uncertain parameters, which could correspond to material properties, boundary conditions, or geometric characteristics, to the collection of coefficients calculated from an $L^2$ projection over the reduced basis. We then perform a non-intrusive evaluation of the neural networks to obtain coefficients corresponding to new values of the uncertain parameters during the online stage. We show that our framework provides reasonable approximations of the DG solution, but it is significantly faster. Moreover, the reduced order framework can capture sharp discontinuities of both displacement and pressure fields resulting from the heterogeneity in the media conductivity, which is generally challenging for intrusive reduced order methods. The sources of error are presented, showing that the nested POD technique is computationally advantageous and still provides comparable accuracy to the classical POD method. We also explore the effect of different choices of the hyperparameters of the neural network on the framework performance.