Gappy Reconstruction of Bubbly Flows by Guided Diffusion Models

Abstract

Experiments in multiphase flows are often limited in their ability to simultaneously obtain velocity measurements in different phases. At the same time, flow reconstruction from phase-limited measurements is a challenging problem due to the substantially different velocity statistics across the phases. We address this problem for buoyancy-driven bubbly flows in the pseudo-turbulence regime by using a guided diffusion model. We train the model using two-dimensional slices of the velocity field extracted from fully resolved three-dimensional direct numerical simulations. The model generates physically realistic velocity fields both unconditionally and when conditioned on the surrounding liquid flow. The reconstructed bubble-phase velocity field accurately reproduces key statistical features of the flow. We further show that a simple patching procedure for adjacent two-dimensional slices enables a reasonable reconstruction of the three-dimensional flow inside a bubble. These results establish the potential of diffusion models to serve as generative priors for three-dimensional turbulent multiphase flows, opening a route toward the reconstruction of unobserved or experimentally inaccessible velocity fields from sparse, partial, or phase-limited measurements.