Neural Network-Based Prediction of Bursting Events in a Turbulent Channel Flow

Neural Network-Based Prediction of Bursting Events in a Turbulent Channel Flow

Enrico SACCAGGI, Gaetano Maria DI CICCA

Abstract. This study investigates the use of a hybrid architecture of a Feed-forward Neural Network (FNN) combined with the Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) to estimate the effect of control on sweep events within the context of an opposition control strategy. The experiments were carried out in a fully turbulent channel flow with a friction Reynolds number of 365. The POD was conducted to reduce the database dimensionality, and then a FNN was trained to predict the non-normalized spatial modes matrix, subsequently allowing the reconstruction of the Conditionally Averaged Sweep Event (CASE). The results demonstrate that the hybrid neural network is capable of reproducing the control signature for different actuation parameters with an accuracy comparable to a conventional neural network, while requiring approximately 90 times fewer trainable parameters.

Keywords
Wall Turbulence, Flow Control, Machine Learning

Published online 7/20/2026, 6 pages
Copyright © 2026 by the author(s)
Published under license by Materials Research Forum LLC., Millersville PA, USA

Citation: Enrico SACCAGGI, Gaetano Maria DI CICCA, Neural Network-Based Prediction of Bursting Events in a Turbulent Channel Flow, Materials Research Proceedings, Vol. 69, pp 31-36, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21741/9781644904251-6

The article was published as article 6 of the book CEAS – AIDAA Conference 2025

Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

References
[1] H. Choi, P. Moin, and J. Kim. Active turbulence control for drag reduction in wall bounded flows. J. Fluid Mech., 75:262, 1994. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022112094000431
[2] H. Rebbeck and K.-S. Choi. Opposition control of near-wall turbulence with a piston-type actuator. Phys. Fluids, 13(8):2142-2145, 2001. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1381563
[3] H. Rebbeck and K.-S. Choi. A wind-tunnel experiment on real-time opposition control of turbulence. Phys. Fluids, 18:035103, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2173295
[4] E. Saccaggi and G. M. Di Cicca. Application of a neural network for predicting the control effect on sweep events in a fully turbulent channel flow. In AIAA AVIATION FORUM AND ASCEND2025, Las Vegas, NV, USA, July 2025. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). AIAA 2025-3022. https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2025-3022
[5] R. F. Blackwelder and R. E. Kaplan. On the wall structure of the turbulent boundary layer. J. Fluid Mech., 76(1):89-112, July 1976. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022112076003145
[6] G. Berkooz, P. Holmes, and J. L. Lumley. The proper orthogonal decomposition in the analysis of turbulent flows. Annu. Rev. Fluid Mech., 25:539-575, 1993. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.fl.25.010193.002543
[7] J. R. Quinlan. Induction of decision trees. Machine learning, 1(1):81-106, 1986. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022643204877
[8] T. Chen and C. Guestrin. Xgboost: A scalable tree boosting system. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 785-794, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1145/2939672.2939785
[9] L. Prechelt. Early stopping-but when?. In: Neural Networks: Tricks of the trade. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2002. p. 55-69. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49430-8_3
[10] M. Ezekiel and K. A. Fox. Methods of correlation and regression analysis. Linear and curvilinear, 1959.