Performing measurements in reacting flows is a challenging task due to the complexity of measuring all quantities of interest simultaneously or limitations in the optical access. To compensate for this, recent advances in deep learning have shown a strong potential in augmenting the information content in datasets composed of partial measurements by reconstructing the quantities that could not be measured. The present work analyses the use of such deep learning tools in two different cases. First, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are used to reconstruct the heat release rate (HRR) from velocity measurements in a methane/air premixed flame under harmonic excitation. The CNNs are trained from complete datasets at some specific frequencies and amplitudes of excitation and their ablility to reconstruct the HRR for different operating conditions with good accuracy is demonstrated. Secondly, an alternate approach based on Physics-Informed Neural Networks that do not require the training data to have all the quantities is explored. It is applied to a puffing pool fire where the velocity field is reconstructed from observations of pressure, temperature and density with good accuracy.

Pool fires are canonical representations of many accidental fires which can exhibit an unstable unsteady behavior, known as puffing, which involves a strong coupling between the temperature and velocity fields. Despite their practical relevance to fire research, their experimental study can be limited due to the complexity of measuring relevant quantities in parallel. In this work, we analyze the use of a recent physics-informed machine learning approach, called hidden fluid mechanics (HFM), to reconstruct unmeasured quantities in a puffing pool fire from measured quantities. The HFM framework relies on a physics-informed neural network (PINN) for this task. A PINN is a neural network that uses both the available data, here the measured quantities, and the physical equations governing the system, here the reacting Navier-Stokes equations, to infer the full fluid dynamic state. This framework is used to infer the velocity field in a puffing pool fire from measurements of density, pressure, and temperature. In this work, the dataset used for this test was generated from numerical simulations. It is shown that the PINN is able to reconstruct the velocity field accurately and to infer most features of the velocity field. In addition, it is shown that the reconstruction accuracy is robust with respect to noisy data, and a reduction in the number of measured quantities is explored and discussed. This study opens up the possibility of using PINNs for the reconstruction of unmeasured quantities from measured ones, providing the potential groundwork for their use in experiments for fire research.