Reconstructing the flame in supersonic combustion flow by using the distribution of the wall pressure based on deep learning

Two models based on the deep learning-based convolutional neural network (CNN) and the re-parameterized convolutional neural network (RepCNN) were designed to reconstruct the flame in the combustor. Experiments were performed on a ground-pulse combustion wind tunnel at a fixed inlet Mach number of 2.5 and different pressures to inject hydrogen to obtain the relevant datasets. The results showed that both models could reconstruct the image of the flame in the combustor based on pressures of the upper and lower walls as well as the pressure at which hydrogen was injected. The average structural similarity index between the reconstructed image of the flame and its actual/original image was 0.9553, the average peak signal-to-noise ratio was 34.201, and the average correlation coefficient was 0.9819. The speed of reconstruction of the image using the RepCNN model improved by 40.7% at the cost of a slightly lower accuracy compared with the CNN model, and it took only 2.85 ms to reconstruct the image of a single flame. The lightweight feature of the RepCNN provides an important foundation for monitoring the model to reconstruct the image of the flame in real time. The work here simplifies requirements on the hardware for ground wind tunnel tests and provides a new idea for examining the characteristics of the flame in small combustors.