Effective control of two-dimensional Rayleigh-Bénard convection: Invariant multi-agent reinforcement learning is all you need

Abstract

Rayleigh–Bénard convection (RBC) is a recurrent phenomenon in a number of industrial and geoscience flows and a well-studied system from a fundamental fluid-mechanics viewpoint. In the present work, we conduct numerical simulations to apply deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for controlling two-dimensional RBC using sensor-based feedback control. We show that effective RBC control can be obtained by leveraging invariant multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), which takes advantage of the locality and translational invariance inherent to RBC flows inside wide channels. MARL applied to RBC allows for an increase in the number of control segments without encountering the curse of dimensionality that would result from a naive increase in the DRL action-size dimension. This is made possible by the MARL ability for re-using the knowledge generated in different parts of the RBC domain. MARL is able to discover an advanced control strategy that destabilizes the spontaneous RBC double-cell pattern, changes the topology of RBC by coalescing adjacent convection cells, and actively controls the resulting coalesced cell to bring it to a new stable configuration. This modified flow configuration results in reduced convective heat transfer, which is beneficial in a number of industrial processes. We additionally draw comparisons with a conventional single-agent reinforcement learning (SARL) setup and report that in the same number of episodes, SARL is not able to learn an effective policy to control the cells. Thus, our work both shows the potential of MARL for controlling large RBC systems and demonstrates the possibility for DRL to discover strategies that move the RBC configuration between different topological configurations, yielding desirable heat-transfer characteristics.