Combustion Control

Achieving high combustion efficiency in flare stacks is crucial for adhering to regulatory standards and controlling the release of hydrocarbons into the environment. Traditional instruments like gas analyzers and hyperspectral cameras are expensive, fragile, and require frequent calibration, which makes them impractical for remote or budget constrained industrial sites. We propose an innovative solution that combines a lightweight vision-language encoder with a compact multi-layer perceptron to predict combustion efficiency directly from low-cost thermal video footage. The fully trained model is integrated into an easy-to-deploy graphical user interface. This interface overlays predicted combustion efficiency values on each video frame, displays real-time trends in combustion efficiency, shows the distribution of combustion efficiency across all frames in the video, and allows users to export CSV reports. Over a six-month period, the system achieved 99% uptime and required less than 15 minutes of maintenance per week.

Real-fluid thermodynamic property evaluation is a major computational cost in supercritical combustion simulations. In the enthalpy-based pressure-correction formulation, the closure evaluates temperature T, density $ρ$, and compressibility coefficient $ψ$ from the solver state (h,p,Y) through enthalpy-temperature inversion and repeated real-fluid equation-of-state evaluations. Neural-network surrogates offer fixed-cost inference, but direct mapping from (h,p,Y) to $(T,ρ,ψ)$ must capture the enthalpy-temperature relation and non-ideal equation-of-state response, resulting in a complex regression problem. This work introduces a thermodynamics-informed input reparameterization strategy, termed target-aligned input reparameterization (TAIR). TAIR replaces the raw enthalpy coordinate of each property network with a target-matched thermodynamic coordinate: the temperature network uses a temperature estimate obtained by inverting a constant-$c_p$ ideal-gas mixture enthalpy approximation, whereas the density and compressibility networks use an ideal-gas density estimate. These algebraic transformations use only solver-available variables and species constants, guiding the networks to learn real-fluid departures from ideal-gas baselines rather than reconstructing the full closure from raw enthalpy. The method is assessed using supercritical methane-oxygen counterflow flame data against a raw-input baseline and target-inconsistent cross-reparameterization controls. TAIR reduces held-out RMSE by factors of about 1.5, 2.0, and 7.5 for T, $ρ$, and $ψ$, respectively. For an unseen strain-rate flame within the augmented thermodynamic envelope, the corresponding factors are 3.6, 14.5, and 6.0. The target-inconsistent controls perform worse, indicating that the gains arise from thermodynamically matched input design rather than generic preprocessing.

Flame diameter is a key measurable parameter in microgravity droplet combustion, but its extraction from self-illuminated frames remains difficult because soot tails, blurred luminous boundaries, chamber reflections, and droplet drift introduce substantial measurement bias and operator dependence. This work presents an AI-enabled digital measurement workflow for automated flame diameter from combustion images. The workflow integrates automatic prompt-point generation into Segment Anything Model 2, employing Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC)-based circle fitting. The automatic prompt strategy removes subjective manual point selection, while the video memory mechanism maintains temporal consistency for drifting droplets, and the RANSAC fitting rejects soot-tail pixels as geometric outliers. The method is validated by 19,537 flame images of n-heptane, n-decane, and n-octane droplets with varying initial diameters. Compared with manual-reference measurements, the proposed workflow achieves a mean relative agreement of 96.9%, a mean absolute percentage error of 3.1%, and substantially outperforms conventional Hough circle detection, which performed worse under the same evaluation conditions. The results also show that the measurement accuracy improves with increasing droplet size. The proposed workflow has a combined standard uncertainty of 8.54% and achieves approximately a 229-fold improvement in efficiency over manual measurement. These results demonstrate that the proposed SAM2-based workflow provides a reproducible, fully automated, and metrologically characterized digital measurement system for extracting flame diameter from challenging combustion images. The approach supports high-throughput combustion diagnostics and illustrates that AI-based segmentation can be integrated into quantitative measurement workflows for digitalized image-based metrology.

We present a physics-constrained machine learning framework for accelerating the direct numerical simulation (DNS) of turbulent reacting flows. The model replaces the direct evaluation of detailed chemical source terms with a surrogate that predicts reaction rates from a reduced thermochemical state. To improve physical consistency, the second law of thermodynamics is incorporated as a training constraint by enforcing non-negative entropy generation, which restricts the evolution of the thermochemical state to physically admissible directions and improves stability during time integration. The approach is demonstrated on DNS of a two-dimensional planar lean premixed methane-air flame interacting with a turbulent flow field. The model reproduces detailed-chemistry results with high fidelity while achieving more than an order-of-magnitude reduction in computational cost. Furthermore, a residual-based synthetic data augmentation strategy enables parametric exploration by constructing new training data from the original dataset, allowing accurate simulation at new inlet conditions without additional detailed-chemistry CFD runs. These results demonstrate that thermodynamically constrained machine learning can provide reliable and computationally efficient surrogates for detailed chemistry in high-fidelity combustion simulations.

This paper presents a physics-guided machine learning (PGML) framework for fuel density prediction, integrating physics constraints and domain knowledge into deep learning models to enhance model accuracy and stability. We explore three deep learning architectures -- ConvLSTM, Adaptive Fourier Neural Operator (AFNONet), and Video Vision Transformer (ViViT) -- to model the spatiotemporal evolution of fuel density. Our approach incorporates differentiable physics-informed terms in the loss function, including a mass-conserving fuel transport term and a rate-of-spread estimation. Experimental results, averaged across multiple independent trials, demonstrate that the proposed PGML framework outperforms purely data-driven baselines without physics constraints in both accuracy and stability. This framework enables computationally efficient, physically plausible fire forecasting to support adaptive prescribed burn management.

We introduce Vidu S1, a real-time interactive video generation model supporting voice control of digital characters. Users can control video generation content at any moment through voice instructions. Vidu S1 supports infinite-length real-time video generation without blurring, drift, or visual distortion. Built with TurboDiffusion and TurboServe, Vidu S1 outputs 540p real-time videos at up to 42 FPS on regular consumer GPUs. Users can upload custom images of real people, anime, and pets, and choose different voice tones for personalized experiences. Experiments show that Vidu S1 achieves the best performance across all test metrics while fully meeting real-time inference requirements. A playable online demo is available at https://vidu.com/vidu-stream.

Robotics increasingly relies on GPUs for parallel simulation, large-scale learning, and neural-network inference. For model predictive control (MPC) to scale with this paradigm, solvers must run efficiently on this hardware while remaining fast, differentiable, and compatible with expressive MPC formulations used in robotics. We present TurboMPC, a differentiable MPC solver that runs entirely on the GPU and supports state and control inequality constraints, implicit integrators, cross-time-coupled costs, and slack variables. TurboMPC combines sequential quadratic programming (SQP), an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) inner solver, implicit differentiation, and a co-designed JAX-CUDA implementation for efficiency and ease of use. In simulation, we validate TurboMPC on constrained planning, humanoid imitation learning, and reinforcement learning with neural-network cost function tasks, achieving up to $15\times$ and $58\times$ speedups over state-of-the-art CPU and GPU differentiable solvers, respectively. We deploy TurboMPC on a full-scale car for minimum-time racing and find that batched, GPU-accelerated tuning of MPC parameters via Bayesian optimization yields significantly faster driving than a hand-tuned baseline. TurboMPC also scales to planning horizons of over $8000$ knot points while maintaining control of the vehicle. We open-source TurboMPC at: https://github.com/ToyotaResearchInstitute/turbompc

Engine order enhancement is central in automotive sound design, where selective harmonics are synthesized to shape perceptual qualities such as sportiness, refinedness, or power. This paper investigates a neural network-based approach to combustion engine sound modeling that extends conventional engine order analysis and enhancement by deriving synthesis parameters from audio data with machine learning and incorporating stochastic components into the synthesis framework. The system parameterizes engine sounds as a compact representation capturing per-order and broadband timbral variation across the full RPM-torque operating range, while remaining manually tunable and compatible with established automotive audio frameworks. The approach leverages gradient-based optimization and analysis-by-synthesis through an end-to-end differentiable implementation. The resulting synthesis parameter set is directly transferable to conventional DSP implementations for deployment on embedded targets. Spectral metrics and listening tests confirm high reconstruction fidelity, and integration into an established automotive audio development platform (EVx Suite) demonstrates technical feasibility on deployment-ready embedded systems.

Multi-fuel compression-ignition engines offer fuel flexibility but introduce uncertain, time-varying fuel reactivity, represented by cetane number (CN), which complicates cycle-to-cycle combustion-phasing control. This work formulates CA50 regulation under latent CN variation as a partially observable sequential decision problem and systematically evaluates controllers with increasing temporal and representational capacity, including LinUCB, history-augmented contextual bandits, observation-only DDPG, recurrent DDPG, and a proposed GRU-guided RL framework. A Gaussian-process surrogate trained on experimental multi-fuel engine data provides a controlled and reproducible evaluation environment. Results show that myopic and fixed-history bandit methods degrade under CN variation, observation-only RL suffers from latent-state aliasing, and generic recurrence is insufficient when CN evolves rapidly. The proposed framework learns a compact GRU-based representation of fuel reactivity from combustion history and conditions both actor and critic on this estimated signal rather than oracle CN. By training the policy on the same imperfect fuel-reactivity information available at deployment, the controller avoids train-deploy inconsistency in conventional online estimate-then-control pipelines. Across unseen CN trajectories, the policy achieves stable CA50 regulation with mean absolute tracking error below 0.25° CA at the training setpoint, while producing smooth, physically consistent SOI and glow-plug-power actuation. These results show that combustion control under latent, continuously evolving fuel dynamics requires more than standalone estimation or generic recurrence. By aligning fuel-reactivity inference with control policy learning, the proposed framework enables reactivity-aware decision-making using the same estimated state available during deployment.

Multi-fuel compression ignition (CI) engines offer superior power density and fuel flexibility. However, achieving consistent and optimal combustion phasing across a wide range of operating conditions remains a major challenge, particularly in the presence of modeling uncertainties. This paper presents a novel, data-driven real-time uncertainty compensation framework for combustion control in multi-fuel CI engines. The proposed approach introduces a pseudo-engine speed that enables dynamic adaptation of control inputs in response to uncertainty affecting the engine. To model the underlying combustion process, a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model is first trained on available input-output data, capturing the nonlinear and fuel-dependent behavior across varying operating conditions. Control inputs are then synthesized through model inversion of the learned GPR surrogate and augmented with an uncertainty compensator designed to mitigate deviations caused by dynamic variations in operating conditions and model inaccuracies. This integrated control strategy allows for real-time input corrections within a finite number of combustion cycles. Theoretical analysis establishes finite-time convergence guarantees for the proposed controller. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method steers the combustion phasing to the desired value in real-time, providing a scalable and adaptive control solution for multi-fuel CI engine operation.

Consumer-level applications require fast optimization of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with high-fidelity novel view rendering. However, existing 3DGS acceleration approaches still incur substantial computation on redundant pixels while sacrificing fine details. In this paper, we present TurboGS, an error-guided training framework that accelerates 3DGS by concentrating optimization on perceptually informative pixels. TurboGS is built upon four core components: (1) a tile-wise sparse pixel sampling, which, driven by multi-view reconstruction errors during training, prioritizes challenging regions and skips well-reconstructed ones to avoid redundant gradient computation; (2) a tile-wise structure-aware loss with sparse Normalized Cross-Correlation, which provides sparse yet effective supervision to preserve fine details and stabilize training; (3) an error-driven Gaussian density control strategy, which dynamically allocates model capacity and removes redundant primitives; and (4) a tailored hybrid optimizer that couples Hessian-informed updates with Adam moment damping to stabilize and improve convergence under sparse supervision. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that TurboGS can deliver on par or superior rendering quality within 100 seconds on a single RTX 5090 GPU card (up to 10x training speedup over vanilla 3DGS).

Turbulent combustion simulations are crucial for many scientific and engineering systems. However, the high cost to fully resolve the complex multiscale and multiphysics behavior makes direct simulation typically infeasible. The equivalent reactor network (ERN) approach attempts to improve computational efficiency by replacing a multidimensional turbulent simulation with a series of much cheaper 0-D and 1-D chemical reactors, providing a surrogate model that retains detailed chemistry at the cost of simplified flow physics. However, their development remains a challenge, often requiring either expert analysis, or automated approaches that sacrifice accuracy. In this work, we develop an automated machine-learning-assisted framework for constructing ERNs of the Sandia-D turbulent methane/air flame. Principal component analysis is first used to reduce high-dimensional thermochemical computational fluid dynamics (CFD) data to a low-dimensional latent space, where k-means clustering identifies physically interpretable flame regions used to initialize a reactor-network graph. This initialization is then refined using finite-difference gradient descent wrapped around non-differentiable Cantera reactor simulations. Across 30 RANS simulations spanning a range of pilot temperatures and inlet methane compositions, the optimized 7-reactor ERN achieves a maximum-temperature $R^2$ score of 0.7945 while preserving a $\sim6000\times$ speedup over the CFD solver. Outlet CO prediction remains more challenging, with a final $R^2$ score of $-0.4183$, but improves substantially from the unoptimized clustering initialization. These results show that unsupervised thermochemical feature extraction can provide effective physics-informed initializations for ERN construction, while gradient-based refinement can significantly improve predictive accuracy without manual reactor-network design.

High-fidelity experimental characterization of turbulent premixed flames remains limited by the cost and complexity of advanced diagnostics, particularly under elevated pressures and intense turbulence where measurements of coupled flame morphology and burning dynamics are sparse. Here, we develop a hierarchical multi-fidelity neural network framework (MuFiNNs) to address this challenge by integrating sparse high-fidelity experimental data with structured low-fidelity representations encoding dominant physical trends. The framework combines hierarchical low-fidelity construction with nonlinear multi-fidelity correction to learn coupled geometric and reactive flame behavior while recovering discrepancies that simplified models alone cannot capture. The methodology is applied to expanding turbulent premixed flames to predict three-dimensional flame wrinkling dynamics and turbulent mass burning velocity across varying fuels, pressures, and turbulence intensities. Using experimentally informed low-fidelity trend models with sparse high-fidelity measurements, MuFiNNs accurately reconstruct observed flame behavior, enable interpolation across unseen operating conditions, and demonstrate robust extrapolation beyond the training domain. Importantly, the framework remains effective in noisy, weakly structured, or experimentally inaccessible regimes where conventional data-driven approaches often fail. These results show that hierarchical multi-fidelity learning provides a scalable and physically grounded strategy for predictive combustion modeling in data-limited regimes. More broadly, this work establishes multi-fidelity scientific machine learning as a practical framework for extracting physically meaningful predictive models from sparse experiments, particularly for instability-dominated and turbulence-sensitive reactive flows where high-fidelity data acquisition is demanding.

Laser absorption spectroscopy (LAS) is a well-established technique for non-intrusive measurement of gas species in combustion and atmospheric environments, but conventional methods struggle with multi-species mixtures under dynamic or interference-laden conditions. Overlapping spectral features, noise, and incomplete reference data limit reliability when unknown or weakly absorbing species are present. This dissertation develops diagnostics combining LAS with machine learning (ML) to address these limitations. Deep denoising autoencoders (DDAEs) are applied to shock-tube measurements during high-speed hydrocarbon pyrolysis, improving signal fidelity and detection limits for trace species. A structured unsupervised framework, HT-SIMNet, then mitigates interference from unknown species without full calibration data, using spectral augmentation and a Noise2Noise-inspired scheme to isolate species in reactive systems. Where reference spectra are unavailable, UnblindMix, an autoencoder-based blind source separation method, reconstructs concentrations and spectral signatures directly from mixture data, validated on mixtures of up to eight components. To recover weakly absorbing species masked by broader absorbers, a feature-engineering method based on first derivatives and convolutions selectively highlights minor species. Finally, VOC-certifire combines randomized smoothing with Voigt-based spectral perturbation to provide certifiable classification of volatile organic compounds under varying conditions. All techniques are experimentally validated and benchmarked. The integration of spectroscopic hardware with ML offers a path toward real-time, interference-resilient, reference-free gas detection for combustion science, environmental monitoring, and industrial safety.

We consider the problem of synthesizing photorealistic, physically plausible combustion effects in in-the-wild 3D scenes. Traditional CFD and graphics pipelines can produce realistic fire effects but rely on handcrafted geometry, expert-tuned parameters, and labor-intensive workflows, limiting their scalability to the real world. Recent scene modeling advances like 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enable high-fidelity real-world scene reconstruction, yet lack physical grounding for combustion. To bridge this gap, we propose FieryGS, a physically-based framework that integrates physically-accurate and user-controllable combustion simulation and rendering within the 3DGS pipeline, enabling realistic fire synthesis for real scenes. Our approach tightly couples three key modules: (1) multimodal large-language-model-based physical material reasoning, (2) efficient volumetric combustion simulation, and (3) a unified renderer for fire and 3DGS. By unifying reconstruction, physical reasoning, simulation, and rendering, FieryGS removes manual tuning and automatically generates realistic, controllable fire dynamics consistent with scene geometry and materials. Our framework supports complex combustion phenomena -- including flame propagation, smoke dispersion, and surface carbonization -- with precise user control over fire intensity, airflow, ignition location and other combustion parameters. Evaluated on diverse indoor and outdoor scenes, FieryGS outperforms all comparative baselines in visual realism, physical fidelity, and controllability. Project page can be found at https://pku-vcl-geometry.github.io/FieryGS/.

The need to burn 100% H2 in high efficient gas turbines featuring low NOx combustion in premix mode require the complete redesign of the combustion system to ensure stable operation without any flashback. Since all engine frames featuring a power range from 4 MW up to 600 MW are affected, a huge design effort is expected. To reduce this effort, especially to transfer knowledge between the different engine classes, generative design methods using latest AI technology will provide promising potential. In this work, this challenge is approached utilizing the current advances in generative artificial intelligence. We train an Invertible Neural Network (INN) on an expandable database of geometrically parameterized combustor designs with simulated performance labels. Utilizing the INN in its inverse direction, multiple design proposals are generated which fulfill specified performance labels.