Physics-informed machine learning models for predicting the progress of reactive-mixing.

This paper presents a physics-informed machine learning (ML) framework to construct reduced-order models (ROMs) for reactive-transport quantities of interest (QoIs) based on high-fidelity numerical simulations. QoIs include species decay, product yield, and degree of mixing. The ROMs for QoIs are applied to quantify and understand how the chemical species evolve over time. First, high-resolution datasets for constructing ROMs are generated by solving anisotropic reaction–diffusion equations using a non-negative finite element formulation for different input parameters. The reactive-mixing model input parameters are: time-scale associated with flipping of velocity, spatial-scale controlling small/large vortex structures of velocity, perturbation parameter of the vortex-based velocity, anisotropic dispersion contrast, and molecular diffusion. Second, random forests, F-test, and mutual information criterion are used to evaluate the importance of model inputs/features with respect to QoIs. We observed that anisotropic dispersion contrast is the most important feature and time-scale associated with flipping of velocity is the least important feature. Third, Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Support Vector Regression (SVR) are used to construct ROMs based on the model inputs. The constructed SVR-ROMs are then used to predict scaling of QoIs. We also present estimates and inequalities on the QoIs, which inform that the species decay, mix, and produce in an exponential fashion. These inequalities also inform that a radial basis function is the most suitable kernel for the SVM/SVR models for QoIs. It is observed that R 2 -score for SVR-ROMs on unseen data is greater than 0.9, implying that the SVR-ROMs are able to predict the reaction–diffusion system state reasonably well. Finally, in terms of the computational cost, the proposed SVM-ROMs are O (1 0 7) times faster than running a high-fidelity finite element simulation for evaluating QoIs. This makes the proposed ML-based ROMs attractive for reactive-transport sensing and real-time monitoring applications as they are significantly faster yet reasonably accurate. • ML-ROMs are built to predict reactive-mixing under heterogeneity and anisotropy. • Accuracy of our ROMs on unseen data is greater than 90%. • Proposed ROMs are ≈ 1 0 7 times faster than high-fidelity numerical simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]