Deep Learning Physical Phenomena*

Transport phenomena studies the exchange of energy, mass, momentum, and charge between systems,\cite{bird2007transport} encompassing fields as diverse as continuum mechanics and thermodynamics, and is used heavily throughout all engineering disciplines. Here, we show that modern deep learning models, such as generative adversarial networks, can be used for rapid simulation of transport phenomena without knowledge of the underlying constitutive equations, developing generative inference based models for steady state heat conduction and incompressible fluid flow problems with arbitrary geometric domains and boundary conditions. In contrast to conventional procedure, the deep learning models learn to generate realistic solutions in a data-driven approach and achieve state-of-the-art computational performance, while retaining high accuracy. Deep learning models for physical inference can be applied to any phenomena, given observed or simulated data, and can be used to learn and predict directly from experiments where the underlying physical model is complicated or unknown.