A generative adversarial network based on an efficient transformer for high-fidelity flow field reconstruction

The reconstruction of high-fidelity flow fields from low-fidelity data has attracted considerable attention in fluid dynamics but poses many challenges to existing deep learning methods due to the spatiotemporal complexity of flows and the lack of standardized benchmark datasets. In this study, we generate a low- and high-fidelity dataset containing 25 600 snapshots of four representative flow dynamics simulations using eight different numerical-precision and grid-resolution configurations. Using this dataset, we develop a physics-guided transformer-based generative adversarial network (PgTransGAN) for concurrently handling numerical-precision and grid-resolution enhancement. PgTransGAN leverages a dual-discriminator-based generative adversarial network for capturing continuous spatial and temporal dynamics of flows and applies a soft-constraint approach to enforce physical consistency in the reconstructed data using gradient information. An efficient transformer model is also developed to obtain the long-term temporal dependencies and further alleviate storage constraints. We compare the performance of PgTransGAN against standard linear interpolation and solutions based solely on convolutional neural networks or generative adversarial networks, and demonstrate that our method achieves better reconstruction quality at the data, image, and physics levels with an upscaling factor of 4 or even 8 in each grid dimension.