Data-driven simulation of a two-phase flow in heterogenous porous media

The numerical methods used to simulate the evolution of hydrodynamic systems require the considerable use of computational resources thus limiting the number of possible simulations. The data-driven simulation technique is one promising approach to the development of heuristic models, which may speed up the study of such models. In this approach, machine learning methods are used to tune the weights of an artificial neural network that predicts the state of a physical system at a given point in time based on initial conditions. This article describes an original neural network architecture and a novel multi-stage training procedure which create a heuristic model of a two-phase flow in a heterogeneous porous medium. The neural network-based model predicts the states of the grid cells at an arbitrary timestep (within the known constraints), taking in only the initial conditions: the properties of the heterogeneous permeability of the medium and the location of sources and sinks. The proposed model requires orders of magnitude less processor time in comparison with the classical numerical method, which served as a criterion for evaluating the effectiveness of the trained model. The proposed architecture includes a number of subnets trained in various combinations on several datasets. The techniques of adversarial training and weight transfer are utilized.