Data-driven prediction of fluid flow and temperature distribution in marine and aerospace engineering has received extensive research and demonstrated its potential in real-time prediction recently. However, usually large amounts of high-fidelity data are required to describe and accurately predict the complex physical information, while in reality, only limited high-fidelity data is available due to the high experiment/computational cost. Therefore, this work proposes a novel multi-fidelity learning method based on the Fourier Neural Operator by jointing abundant low-fidelity data and limited high-fidelity data under transfer learning paradigm. First, as a resolution-invariant operator, the Fourier Neural Operator is first and gainfully applied to integrate multi-fidelity data directly, which can utilize the scarce high-fidelity data and abundant low-fidelity data simultaneously. Then, the transfer learning framework is developed for the current task by extracting the rich low-fidelity data knowledge to assist high-fidelity modeling training, to further improve data-driven prediction accuracy. Finally, three typical fluid and temperature prediction problems are chosen to validate the accuracy of the proposed multi-fidelity model. The results demonstrate that our proposed method has high effectiveness when compared with other high-fidelity models, and has the high modeling accuracy of 99% for all the selected physical field problems. Significantly, the proposed multi-fidelity learning method has the potential of a simple structure with high precision, which can provide a reference for the construction of the subsequent model.

Recently, surrogate models based on deep learning have attracted much attention for engineering analysis and optimization. As the construction of data pairs in most engineering problems is time-consuming, data acquisition is becoming the predictive capability bottleneck of most deep surrogate models, which also exists in surrogate for thermal analysis and design. To address this issue, this paper develops a physics-informed convolutional neural network (CNN) for the thermal simulation surrogate. The network can learn a mapping from heat source layout to the steady-state temperature field without labeled data, which equals solving an entire family of partial difference equations (PDEs). To realize the physics-guided training without labeled data, we employ the heat conduction equation and finite difference method to construct the loss function. Since the solution is sensitive to boundary conditions, we properly impose hard constraints by padding in the Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. In addition, the neural network architecture is well-designed to improve the prediction precision of the problem at hand, and pixel-level online hard example mining is introduced to overcome the imbalance of optimization difficulty in the computation domain. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can provide comparable predictions with numerical method and data-driven deep learning models. We also conduct various ablation studies to investigate the effectiveness of the network component and training methods proposed in this paper.