Robust Emulator for Compressible Navier-Stokes using Equivariant Geometric Convolutions

Recent methods to simulate complex fluid dynamics problems have replaced computationally expensive and slow numerical integrators with surrogate models learned from data. However, while the laws of physics are relationships between scalars, vectors, and tensors that hold regardless of the frame of reference or chosen coordinate system, surrogate machine learning models are not coordinate-free by default. We enforce coordinate freedom by using geometric convolutions in three model architectures: a ResNet, a Dilated ResNet, and a UNet. In numerical experiments emulating 2D compressible Navier-Stokes, we see better accuracy and improved stability compared to baseline surrogate models in almost all cases. The ease of enforcing coordinate freedom without making major changes to the model architecture provides an exciting recipe for any CNN-based method applied on an appropriate class of problems.