The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and its progressively wider impact on many sectors requires an assessment of its effect on the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Using a consensus-based expert elicitation process, we find that AI can enable the accomplishment of 134 targets across all the goals, but it may also inhibit 59 targets. However, current research foci overlook important aspects. The fast development of AI needs to be supported by the necessary regulatory insight and oversight for AI-based technologies to enable sustainable development. Failure to do so could result in gaps in transparency, safety, and ethical standards.

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are successful machine-learning methods for the solution and identification of partial differential equations. We employ PINNs for solving the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations for incompressible turbulent flows without any specific model or assumption for turbulence and by taking only the data on the domain boundaries. We first show the applicability of PINNs for solving the Navier–Stokes equations for laminar flows by solving the Falkner–Skan boundary layer. We then apply PINNs for the simulation of four turbulent-flow cases, i.e., zero-pressure-gradient boundary layer, adverse-pressure-gradient boundary layer, and turbulent flows over a NACA4412 airfoil and the periodic hill. Our results show the excellent applicability of PINNs for laminar flows with strong pressure gradients, where predictions with less than 1% error can be obtained. For turbulent flows, we also obtain very good accuracy on simulation results even for the Reynolds-stress components.

In the present work, we assess the capabilities of neural networks to predict temporally evolving turbulent flows. In particular, we use the nine-equation shear flow model by Moehlis et al. [ New J. Phys. 6, 56 (2004)] to generate training data for two types of neural networks: the multilayer perceptron (MLP) and the long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. We tested a number of neural network architectures by varying the number of layers, number of units per layer, dimension of the input, and weight initialization and activation functions in order to obtain the best configurations for flow prediction. Because of its ability to exploit the sequential nature of the data, the LSTM network outperformed the MLP. The LSTM led to excellent predictions of turbulence statistics (with relative errors of $0.45\%$ and $2.49\%$ in mean and fluctuating quantities, respectively) and of the dynamical behavior of the system (characterized by Poincaré maps and Lyapunov exponents). This is an exploratory study where we consider a low-order representation of near-wall turbulence. Based on the present results, the proposed machine-learning framework may underpin future applications aimed at developing accurate and efficient data-driven subgrid-scale models for large-eddy simulations of more complex wall-bounded turbulent flows, including channels and developing boundary layers.

Two models based on convolutional neural networks are trained to predict the two-dimensional instantaneous velocity-fluctuation fields at different wall-normal locations in a turbulent open-channel flow, using the wall-shear-stress components and the wall pressure as inputs. The first model is a fully convolutional neural network (FCN) which directly predicts the fluctuations, while the second one reconstructs the flow fields using a linear combination of orthonormal basis functions, obtained through proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), and is hence named FCN-POD. Both models are trained using data from direct numerical simulations at friction Reynolds numbers $Re_{\tau } = 180$ and 550. Being able to predict the nonlinear interactions in the flow, both models show better predictions than the extended proper orthogonal decomposition (EPOD), which establishes a linear relation between the input and output fields. The performance of the models is compared based on predictions of the instantaneous fluctuation fields, turbulence statistics and power-spectral densities. FCN exhibits the best predictions closer to the wall, whereas FCN-POD provides better predictions at larger wall-normal distances. We also assessed the feasibility of transfer learning for the FCN model, using the model parameters learned from the $Re_{\tau }=180$ dataset to initialize those of the model that is trained on the $Re_{\tau }=550$ dataset. After training the initialized model at the new $Re_{\tau }$ , our results indicate the possibility of matching the reference-model performance up to $y^{+}=50$ , with $50\,\%$ and $25\,\%$ of the original training data. We expect that these non-intrusive sensing models will play an important role in applications related to closed-loop control of wall-bounded turbulence.

Variational autoencoder architectures have the potential to develop reduced-order models for chaotic fluid flows. We propose a method for learning compact and near-orthogonal reduced-order models using a combination of aβ-variational autoencoder and a transformer, tested on numerical data from a two-dimensional viscous flow in both periodic and chaotic regimes. Theβ-variational autoencoder is trained to learn a compact latent representation of the flow velocity, and the transformer is trained to predict the temporal dynamics in latent-space. Using theβ-variational autoencoder to learn disentangled representations in latent-space, we obtain a more interpretable flow model with features that resemble those observed in the proper orthogonal decomposition, but with a more efficient representation. Using Poincaré maps, the results show that our method can capture the underlying dynamics of the flow outperforming other prediction models. The proposed method has potential applications in other fields such as weather forecasting, structural dynamics or biomedical engineering.