Probabilistic Simulation of Gas-Liquid Interfaces with Coupled Flow Matching on Spherical Harmonics
Abstract
Bubbly flows involve strongly coupled bubble motion, deformation, and hydrodynamic interactions, making high-fidelity simulation computationally expensive. We propose a neural surrogate that jointly predicts bubble trajectories and interface deformation in a compact, shared representation, replacing costly mesh-resolved simulation with fast generative inference. Because two-phase flow dynamics is nonlinear and chaotic, we treat forecasting as a conditional generative problem rather than deterministic regression, predicting entire future windows in a single pass. We train and evaluate the surrogate on BubbleSH, a Front-Tracking dataset of rising deformable bubble swarms, assessing performance using trajectory, shape, and distributional metrics over kinematic, morphological, and interaction-based properties. The surrogate reproduces key flow statistics while running several orders of magnitude faster than the underlying DNS solver.