Patched Flow Matching: Generative Wall-Pressure Reconstruction Beyond Training-Domain Scales from Sparse Sensors

Meet Hemant Parikh; Yi Liu; Jian-Xun Wang

physics.flu-dynJun 20, 2026

Patched Flow Matching: Generative Wall-Pressure Reconstruction Beyond Training-Domain Scales from Sparse Sensors

Authors: Meet Hemant Parikh, Yi Liu, Jian-Xun Wang

Organizations: aSibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY · bDepartment of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN

Abstract

Characterizing the complete wall-pressure spectrum in turbulent wall-bounded flows requires simultaneous access to the viscous-scale high-wavenumber content and the outer-layer low-wavenumber content -- a requirement that neither short-domain direct numerical simulation (DNS) nor sparse experimental measurements alone can satisfy. We propose Patched Flow Matching (Patched FM), a generative framework that fuses these two complementary sources by learning a patch-local prior over inner-scaled wall-pressure statistics from short-domain DNS and assimilating sparse sensor measurements at inference time through training-free posterior sampling. The patch-additive decomposition of the flow matching vector field decouples the generative prior from the global domain size, enabling reconstruction on domains arbitrarily larger than the training configuration. By expressing the patch prior in inner-scaled coordinates, where high-wavenumber wall-pressure statistics are approximately Reynolds-number invariant, the framework extends to higher Reynolds numbers through hierarchical transfer learning with as few as $500$ short-domain snapshots ( $2.5\%$ of the base training data) at a fraction of the scratch-training cost. Applied to compressible channel-flow DNS at $Re_τ= 180$ , $500$ , and $1000$ , Patched FM reconstructs full-resolution wall-pressure fields on a domain four times larger than the training configuration ( $L_x^L = 16πδ$ versus $L_x^S = 4πδ$ ) from sensor coverage as low as $0.25\%$ , recovering the low-wavenumber spectral content inaccessible to short-domain DNS with high fidelity in both streamwise and spanwise directions. Zero-shot generalization to unseen Reynolds numbers and ablation studies further confirm the role of inner scaling as a physical prerequisite for data-efficient Reynolds-number transfer.

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