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Published work

48 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

GRAFT-ATHENA: Self-Improving Agentic Teams for Autonomous Discovery and Evolutionary Numerical Algorithms

Scientific discovery can be modeled as a sequence of probabilistic decisions that map physical problems to numerical solutions. Recent agentic AI systems automate individual scientific tasks by orchestrating LLM-driven planners, solvers, and evaluators. Each method is a combination of methodological actions, with many viable combinations for any given problem and structural dependencies between choices. However, existing frameworks treat each problem in isolation, with no shared substrate to accumulate methodological experience across domains. Here we show that GRAFT-ATHENA, a self-improving agentic framework, learns from past problems and autonomously expands its own action space across diverse domains. GRAFT (Graph Reduction to Adaptive Factored Trees) projects combinatorial decision spaces into factored probabilistic trees in which each method is a single path, taking the parameter footprint from exponential to linear. In the lineage of classical Bayesian networks, the factorization is an $I$-map of the policy, and the resulting paths embed as unique fingerprints in a metric space whose closeness lets each new problem learn from similar past ones. On canonical physics-informed machine learning (PIML) benchmarks, GRAFT-ATHENA improves over human and prior agentic baselines, and on production solvers, it tackles complex engineering problems such as reconstructing Mach-10 flow over the Apollo Command Module from a 1968 report and recovering shear-thinning blood-cell rheology. Notably, the system grows its own knowledge substrate, autonomously proposing regularization constraints for ill-posed inverse problems and discovering new numerical methods such as a spectral PINN with exponential convergence. These results provide a foundation for autonomous laboratories that grow more capable with every problem they solve.

preprint2026arXiv

Multi-fidelity surrogates for mechanics of composites: from co-kriging to multi-fidelity neural networks

Composite materials exhibit strongly hierarchical and anisotropic properties governed by coupled mechanisms spanning constituents, plies, laminates, structures, and manufacturing history. This intrinsic complexity makes predictive modeling of composites expensive, because repeated experiments and high-fidelity simulations are needed to cover large design spaces of material, structure, and manufacturing. Multi-fidelity surrogate modeling addresses this challenge by combining abundant, less expensive data with limited high-accuracy data to recover reliable high-fidelity predictions. This review presents a structured overview of multi-fidelity modeling for composite mechanics, covering Gaussian-process or Kriging-based methods, including co-Kriging, coregionalization models, autoregressive formulations, nonlinear autoregressive Gaussian processes, multi-fidelity deep Gaussian processes, and multi-fidelity neural networks. Their distinctions are examined in terms of cross-fidelity correlation, discrepancy representation, uncertainty quantification, and scalability. Selected examples of their applications to composites are introduced according to the roles that multi-fidelity surrogates play in engineering problems, including forward prediction for rapid exploration of material design spaces, inverse optimization for composite parameter identification and design search under limited high-fidelity access, and workflow integration, where heterogeneous data sources, constraints, and validation requirements determine model utility. Open question discussions highlight recurring challenges specific to composites, such as regime-dependent fidelity gaps associated with nonlinear damage and manufacturing history, mismatches between simulations and experiments, and uncertainty propagation across multi-fidelity models.

preprint2026arXiv

NSPOD: Accelerating Krylov solvers via DeepONet-learned POD subspaces

The convergence of Krylov-based linear iterative solvers applied to parametric partial differential equations (PDEs) is often highly sensitive to the domain, its discretization, the location/values of the applied Dirichlet/Neumann boundary conditions, body forces and material properties, among others. We have previously introduced hybridization of classical linear iterative solvers with neural operators for specific geometries, but they tend to not perform well on geometries not previously seen during training. We partially addressed this challenge by introducing the deep operator network Geo-DeepONet and hybridizing it with Krylov-based iterative linear solvers, which, despite learning effectively across arbitrary unstructured meshes without requiring retraining, led to only modest reductions in iterations compared to state-of-the-art preconditioners. In this study we introduce Neural Subspace Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (NSPOD), a multigrid-like deep operator network-based preconditioner which can dramatically reduce the number of iterations needed for convergence in Krylov-based linear iterative solvers, even when compared to state-of-the-art methods such as algebraic multigrid preconditioners. We demonstrate its efficiency via numerical experiments on a linearized version of solid mechanics PDEs applied to unstructured domains obtained from complex CAD geometries. We expect that the findings in this study lead to more efficient hybrid preconditioners that can match, or possibly even surpass, the convergence properties of the current gold standard preconditioning methods for solid mechanics PDEs.

preprint2026arXiv

UFO: A Domain-Unification-Free Operator Framework for Generalized Operator Learning

Neural operators have become an effective framework for learning mappings between function spaces, yet most existing architectures realize operators within a single representational domain, such as physical, spectral, or latent space. In this work, we introduce UFO (Domain-Unification-Free Operator), a cross-domain neural operator framework that realizes operators through adaptive, jointly conditioned interactions among representations defined on distinct domains. UFO enables discretization decoupling: the input function can be observed at resolutions or locations different from those used during training, while the solution can be queried at arbitrary output resolutions. Across four complementary benchmarks covering discontinuous inputs, irregular sampling with spectral mismatch, nonlinear dynamics, and stochastic high-frequency fields, UFO delivers accurate, robust, and physically coherent predictions under distribution shifts. These results establish cross-domain, phase-modulated realization as a powerful framework for discretization-decoupled neural operator learning.

preprint2025arXiv

GIMLET: Generalizable and Interpretable Model Learning through Embedded Thermodynamics

We develop a data-driven framework for discovering constitutive relations in models of fluid flow and scalar transport. Under the assumption that velocity and/or scalar fields are measured, our approach infers unknown closure terms in the governing equations as neural networks. The target to be discovered is the constitutive relations only, while the temporal derivative, convective transport terms, and pressure-gradient term in the governing equations are prescribed. The formulation is rooted in a variational principle from non-equilibrium thermodynamics, where the dynamics is defined by a free-energy functional and a dissipation functional. The unknown constitutive terms arise as functional derivatives of these functionals with respect to the state variables. To enable a flexible and structured model discovery, the free-energy and dissipation functionals are parameterized using neural networks, while their functional derivatives are obtained via automatic differentiation. This construction enforces thermodynamic consistency by design, guaranteeing monotonic decay of the total free energy and non-negative entropy production. The resulting method, termed GIMLET (Generalizable and Interpretable Model Learning through Embedded Thermodynamics), avoids reliance on a predefined library of candidate functions, unlike sparse regression or symbolic identification approaches. The learned models are generalizable in that functionals identified from one dataset can be transferred to distinct datasets governed by the same underlying equations. Moreover, the inferred free-energy and dissipation functions provide direct physical interpretability of the learned dynamics. The framework is demonstrated on several benchmark systems, including the viscous Burgers equation, the Kuramoto--Sivashinsky equation, and the incompressible Navier--Stokes equations for both Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids.

preprint2025arXiv

Toward Autonomous Engineering Design: A Knowledge-Guided Multi-Agent Framework

The engineering design process often demands expertise from multiple domains, leading to complex collaborations and iterative refinements. Traditional methods can be resource-intensive and prone to inefficiencies. To address this, we formalize the engineering design process through a multi-agent AI framework that integrates structured design and review loops. The framework introduces specialized knowledge-driven agents that collaborate to generate and refine design candidates. As an exemplar, we demonstrate its application to the aerodynamic optimization of 4-digit NACA airfoils. The framework consists of three key AI agents: a Graph Ontologist, a Design Engineer, and a Systems Engineer. The Graph Ontologist employs a Large Language Model (LLM) to construct two domain-specific knowledge graphs from airfoil design literature. The Systems Engineer, informed by a human manager, formulates technical requirements that guide design generation and evaluation. The Design Engineer leverages the design knowledge graph and computational tools to propose candidate airfoils meeting these requirements. The Systems Engineer reviews and provides feedback both qualitative and quantitative using its own knowledge graph, forming an iterative feedback loop until a design is validated by the manager. The final design is then optimized to maximize performance metrics such as the lift-to-drag ratio. Overall, this work demonstrates how collaborative AI agents equipped with structured knowledge representations can enhance efficiency, consistency, and quality in the engineering design process.

preprint2023arXiv

Analysis of biologically plausible neuron models for regression with spiking neural networks

This paper explores the impact of biologically plausible neuron models on the performance of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) for regression tasks. While SNNs are widely recognized for classification tasks, their application to Scientific Machine Learning and regression remains underexplored. We focus on the membrane component of SNNs, comparing four neuron models: Leaky Integrate-and-Fire, FitzHugh-Nagumo, Izhikevich, and Hodgkin-Huxley. We investigate their effect on SNN accuracy and efficiency for function regression tasks, by using Euler and Runge-Kutta 4th-order approximation schemes. We show how more biologically plausible neuron models improve the accuracy of SNNs while reducing the number of spikes in the system. The latter represents an energetic gain on actual neuromorphic chips since it directly reflects the amount of energy required for the computations.

preprint2022arXiv

Deep learning of inverse water waves problems using multi-fidelity data: Application to Serre-Green-Naghdi equations

We consider strongly-nonlinear and weakly-dispersive surface water waves governed by equations of Boussinesq type, known as the Serre-Green-Naghdi system; it describes future states of the free water surface and depth averaged horizontal velocity, given their initial state. The lack of knowledge of the velocity field as well as the initial states provided by measurements lead to an ill-posed problem that cannot be solved by traditional techniques. To this end, we employ physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to generate solutions to such ill-posed problems using only data of the free surface elevation and depth of the water. PINNs can readily incorporate the physical laws and the observational data, thereby enabling inference of the physical quantities of interest. In the present study, both experimental and synthetic (generated by numerical methods) training data are used to train PINNs. Furthermore, multi-fidelity data are used to solve the inverse water wave problem by leveraging both high- and low-fidelity data sets. The applicability of the PINN methodology for the estimation of the impact of water waves onto solid obstacles is demonstrated after deriving the corresponding equations. The present methodology can be employed to efficiently design offshore structures such as oil platforms, wind turbines, etc. by solving the corresponding ill-posed inverse water waves problem.

preprint2022arXiv

DynG2G: An Efficient Stochastic Graph Embedding Method for Temporal Graphs

Dynamic graph embedding has gained great attention recently due to its capability of learning low dimensional graph representations for complex temporal graphs with high accuracy. However, recent advances mostly focus on learning node embeddings as deterministic "vectors" for static graphs yet disregarding the key graph temporal dynamics and the evolving uncertainties associated with node embedding in the latent space. In this work, we propose an efficient stochastic dynamic graph embedding method (DynG2G) that applies an inductive feed-forward encoder trained with node triplet-based contrastive loss. Every node per timestamp is encoded as a time-dependent probabilistic multivariate Gaussian distribution in the latent space, hence we can quantify the node embedding uncertainty on-the-fly. We adopted eight different benchmarks that represent diversity in size (from 96 nodes to 87,626 and from 13,398 edges to 4,870,863) and diversity in dynamics. We demonstrate via extensive experiments on these eight dynamic graph benchmarks that DynG2G achieves new state-of-the-art performance in capturing the underlying temporal node embeddings. We also demonstrate that DynG2G can predict the evolving node embedding uncertainty, which plays a crucial role in quantifying the intrinsic dimensionality of the dynamical system over time. We obtain a universal relation of the optimal embedding dimension, $L_o$, versus the effective dimensionality of uncertainty, $D_u$, and we infer that $L_o=D_u$ for all cases. This implies that the uncertainty quantification approach we employ in the DynG2G correctly captures the intrinsic dimensionality of the dynamics of such evolving graphs despite the diverse nature and composition of the graphs at each timestamp. Moreover, this $L_0 - D_u$ correlation provides a clear path to select adaptively the optimum embedding size at each timestamp by setting $L \ge D_u$.

preprint2022arXiv

Error estimates for DeepOnets: A deep learning framework in infinite dimensions

DeepONets have recently been proposed as a framework for learning nonlinear operators mapping between infinite dimensional Banach spaces. We analyze DeepONets and prove estimates on the resulting approximation and generalization errors. In particular, we extend the universal approximation property of DeepONets to include measurable mappings in non-compact spaces. By a decomposition of the error into encoding, approximation and reconstruction errors, we prove both lower and upper bounds on the total error, relating it to the spectral decay properties of the covariance operators, associated with the underlying measures. We derive almost optimal error bounds with very general affine reconstructors and with random sensor locations as well as bounds on the generalization error, using covering number arguments. We illustrate our general framework with four prototypical examples of nonlinear operators, namely those arising in a nonlinear forced ODE, an elliptic PDE with variable coefficients and nonlinear parabolic and hyperbolic PDEs. While the approximation of arbitrary Lipschitz operators by DeepONets to accuracy $ε$ is argued to suffer from a "curse of dimensionality" (requiring a neural networks of exponential size in $1/ε$), in contrast, for all the above concrete examples of interest, we rigorously prove that DeepONets can break this curse of dimensionality (achieving accuracy $ε$ with neural networks of size that can grow algebraically in $1/ε$). Thus, we demonstrate the efficient approximation of a potentially large class of operators with this machine learning framework.

preprint2022arXiv

Fractional SEIR Model and Data-Driven Predictions of COVID-19 Dynamics of Omicron Variant

We study the dynamic evolution of COVID-19 cased by the Omicron variant via a fractional susceptible-exposedinfected-removed (SEIR) model. Preliminary data suggest that the symptoms of Omicron infection are not prominent and the transmission is therefore more concealed, which causes a relatively slow increase in the detected cases of the new infected at the beginning of the pandemic. To characterize the specific dynamics, the Caputo-Hadamard fractional derivative is adopted to refined the classical SEIR model. Based on the reported data, we infer the fractional order, timedependent parameters, as well as unobserved dynamics of the fractional SEIR model via fractional physics-informed neural networks (fPINNs). Then, we make short-time predictions using the learned fractional SEIR model.

preprint2022arXiv

G2Φnet: Relating Genotype and Biomechanical Phenotype of Tissues with Deep Learning

Many genetic mutations adversely affect the structure and function of load-bearing soft tissues, with clinical sequelae often responsible for disability or death. Parallel advances in genetics and histomechanical characterization provide significant insight into these conditions, but there remains a pressing need to integrate such information. We present a novel genotype-to-biomechanical-phenotype neural network (G2Φnet) for characterizing and classifying biomechanical properties of soft tissues, which serve as important functional readouts of tissue health or disease. We illustrate the utility of our approach by inferring the nonlinear, genotype-dependent constitutive behavior of the aorta for four mouse models involving defects or deficiencies in extracellular constituents. We show that G2Φnet can infer the biomechanical response while simultaneously ascribing the associated genotype correctly by utilizing limited, noisy, and unstructured experimental data. More broadly, G2Φnet provides a powerful method and a paradigm shift for correlating genotype and biomechanical phenotype quantitatively, promising a better understanding of their interplay in biological tissues.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning two-phase microstructure evolution using neural operators and autoencoder architectures

Phase-field modeling is an effective but computationally expensive method for capturing the mesoscale morphological and microstructure evolution in materials. Hence, fast and generalizable surrogate models are needed to alleviate the cost of computationally taxing processes such as in optimization and design of materials. The intrinsic discontinuous nature of the physical phenomena incurred by the presence of sharp phase boundaries makes the training of the surrogate model cumbersome. We develop a framework that integrates a convolutional autoencoder architecture with a deep neural operator (DeepONet) to learn the dynamic evolution of a two-phase mixture and accelerate time-to-solution in predicting the microstructure evolution. We utilize the convolutional autoencoder to provide a compact representation of the microstructure data in a low-dimensional latent space. DeepONet, which consists of two sub-networks, one for encoding the input function at a fixed number of sensors locations (branch net) and another for encoding the locations for the output functions (trunk net), learns the mesoscale dynamics of the microstructure evolution from the autoencoder latent space. The decoder part of the convolutional autoencoder then reconstructs the time-evolved microstructure from the DeepONet predictions. The trained DeepONet architecture can then be used to replace the high-fidelity phase-field numerical solver in interpolation tasks or to accelerate the numerical solver in extrapolation tasks.

preprint2022arXiv

Neural operator learning of heterogeneous mechanobiological insults contributing to aortic aneurysms

Thoracic aortic aneurysm (TAA) is a localized dilatation of the aorta resulting from compromised wall composition, structure, and function, which can lead to life-threatening dissection or rupture. Several genetic mutations and predisposing factors that contribute to TAA have been studied in mouse models to characterize specific changes in aortic microstructure and material properties that result from a wide range of mechanobiological insults. Assessments of TAA progression in vivo is largely limited to measurements of aneurysm size and growth rate. It has been shown that aortic geometry alone is not sufficient to predict the patient-specific progression of TAA but computational modeling of the evolving biomechanics of the aorta could predict future geometry and properties from initiating insults. In this work, we present an integrated framework to train a deep operator network (DeepONet)-based surrogate model to identify contributing factors for TAA by using FE-based datasets of aortic growth and remodeling resulting from prescribed insults. For training data, we investigate multiple types of TAA risk factors and spatial distributions within a constrained mixture model to generate axial--azimuthal maps of aortic dilatation and distensibility. The trained network is then capable of predicting the initial distribution and extent of the insult from a given set of dilatation and distensibility information. Two DeepONet frameworks are proposed, one trained on sparse information and one on full-field grayscale images, to gain insight into a preferred neural operator-based approach. Performance of the surrogate models is evaluated through multiple simulations carried out on insult distributions varying from fusiform to complex. We show that the proposed approach can predict patient-specific mechanobiological insult profile with a high accuracy, particularly when based on full-field images.

preprint2022arXiv

NeuralUQ: A comprehensive library for uncertainty quantification in neural differential equations and operators

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in machine learning is currently drawing increasing research interest, driven by the rapid deployment of deep neural networks across different fields, such as computer vision, natural language processing, and the need for reliable tools in risk-sensitive applications. Recently, various machine learning models have also been developed to tackle problems in the field of scientific computing with applications to computational science and engineering (CSE). Physics-informed neural networks and deep operator networks are two such models for solving partial differential equations and learning operator mappings, respectively. In this regard, a comprehensive study of UQ methods tailored specifically for scientific machine learning (SciML) models has been provided in [45]. Nevertheless, and despite their theoretical merit, implementations of these methods are not straightforward, especially in large-scale CSE applications, hindering their broad adoption in both research and industry settings. In this paper, we present an open-source Python library (https://github.com/Crunch-UQ4MI), termed NeuralUQ and accompanied by an educational tutorial, for employing UQ methods for SciML in a convenient and structured manner. The library, designed for both educational and research purposes, supports multiple modern UQ methods and SciML models. It is based on a succinct workflow and facilitates flexible employment and easy extensions by the users. We first present a tutorial of NeuralUQ and subsequently demonstrate its applicability and efficiency in four diverse examples, involving dynamical systems and high-dimensional parametric and time-dependent PDEs.

preprint2022arXiv

Physics-Informed Deep Neural Operator Networks

Standard neural networks can approximate general nonlinear operators, represented either explicitly by a combination of mathematical operators, e.g., in an advection-diffusion-reaction partial differential equation, or simply as a black box, e.g., a system-of-systems. The first neural operator was the Deep Operator Network (DeepONet), proposed in 2019 based on rigorous approximation theory. Since then, a few other less general operators have been published, e.g., based on graph neural networks or Fourier transforms. For black box systems, training of neural operators is data-driven only but if the governing equations are known they can be incorporated into the loss function during training to develop physics-informed neural operators. Neural operators can be used as surrogates in design problems, uncertainty quantification, autonomous systems, and almost in any application requiring real-time inference. Moreover, independently pre-trained DeepONets can be used as components of a complex multi-physics system by coupling them together with relatively light training. Here, we present a review of DeepONet, the Fourier neural operator, and the graph neural operator, as well as appropriate extensions with feature expansions, and highlight their usefulness in diverse applications in computational mechanics, including porous media, fluid mechanics, and solid mechanics.

preprint2022arXiv

Physics-informed neural networks for inverse problems in supersonic flows

Accurate solutions to inverse supersonic compressible flow problems are often required for designing specialized aerospace vehicles. In particular, we consider the problem where we have data available for density gradients from Schlieren photography as well as data at the inflow and part of wall boundaries. These inverse problems are notoriously difficult and traditional methods may not be adequate to solve such ill-posed inverse problems. To this end, we employ the physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and its extended version, extended PINNs (XPINNs), where domain decomposition allows deploying locally powerful neural networks in each subdomain, which can provide additional expressivity in subdomains, where a complex solution is expected. Apart from the governing compressible Euler equations, we also enforce the entropy conditions in order to obtain viscosity solutions. Moreover, we enforce positivity conditions on density and pressure. We consider inverse problems involving two-dimensional expansion waves, two-dimensional oblique and bow shock waves. We compare solutions obtained by PINNs and XPINNs and invoke some theoretical results that can be used to decide on the generalization errors of the two methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Scalable algorithms for physics-informed neural and graph networks

Physics-informed machine learning (PIML) has emerged as a promising new approach for simulating complex physical and biological systems that are governed by complex multiscale processes for which some data are also available. In some instances, the objective is to discover part of the hidden physics from the available data, and PIML has been shown to be particularly effective for such problems for which conventional methods may fail. Unlike commercial machine learning where training of deep neural networks requires big data, in PIML big data are not available. Instead, we can train such networks from additional information obtained by employing the physical laws and evaluating them at random points in the space-time domain. Such physics-informed machine learning integrates multimodality and multifidelity data with mathematical models, and implements them using neural networks or graph networks. Here, we review some of the prevailing trends in embedding physics into machine learning, using physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) based primarily on feed-forward neural networks and automatic differentiation. For more complex systems or systems of systems and unstructured data, graph neural networks (GNNs) present some distinct advantages, and here we review how physics-informed learning can be accomplished with GNNs based on graph exterior calculus to construct differential operators; we refer to these architectures as physics-informed graph networks (PIGNs). We present representative examples for both forward and inverse problems and discuss what advances are needed to scale up PINNs, PIGNs and more broadly GNNs for large-scale engineering problems.

preprint2022arXiv

SympOCnet: Solving optimal control problems with applications to high-dimensional multi-agent path planning problems

Solving high-dimensional optimal control problems in real-time is an important but challenging problem, with applications to multi-agent path planning problems, which have drawn increased attention given the growing popularity of drones in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network method called SympOCnet that applies the Symplectic network to solve high-dimensional optimal control problems with state constraints. We present several numerical results on path planning problems in two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces. Specifically, we demonstrate that our SympOCnet can solve a problem with more than 500 dimensions in 1.5 hours on a single GPU, which shows the effectiveness and efficiency of SympOCnet. The proposed method is scalable and has the potential to solve truly high-dimensional path planning problems in real-time.

preprint2022arXiv

Systems Biology: Identifiability analysis and parameter identification via systems-biology informed neural networks

The dynamics of systems biological processes are usually modeled by a system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with many unknown parameters that need to be inferred from noisy and sparse measurements. Here, we introduce systems-biology informed neural networks for parameter estimation by incorporating the system of ODEs into the neural networks. To complete the workflow of system identification, we also describe structural and practical identifiability analysis to analyze the identifiability of parameters. We use the ultridian endocrine model for glucose-insulin interaction as the example to demonstrate all these methods and their implementation.

preprint2021arXiv

A comprehensive and fair comparison of two neural operators (with practical extensions) based on FAIR data

Neural operators can learn nonlinear mappings between function spaces and offer a new simulation paradigm for real-time prediction of complex dynamics for realistic diverse applications as well as for system identification in science and engineering. Herein, we investigate the performance of two neural operators, and we develop new practical extensions that will make them more accurate and robust and importantly more suitable for industrial-complexity applications. The first neural operator, DeepONet, was published in 2019, and the second one, named Fourier Neural Operator or FNO, was published in 2020. In order to compare FNO with DeepONet for realistic setups, we develop several extensions of FNO that can deal with complex geometric domains as well as mappings where the input and output function spaces are of different dimensions. We also endow DeepONet with special features that provide inductive bias and accelerate training, and we present a faster implementation of DeepONet with cost comparable to the computational cost of FNO. We consider 16 different benchmarks to demonstrate the relative performance of the two neural operators, including instability wave analysis in hypersonic boundary layers, prediction of the vorticity field of a flapping airfoil, porous media simulations in complex-geometry domains, etc. The performance of DeepONet and FNO is comparable for relatively simple settings, but for complex geometries and especially noisy data, the performance of FNO deteriorates greatly. For example, for the instability wave analysis with only 0.1% noise added to the input data, the error of FNO increases 10000 times making it inappropriate for such important applications, while there is hardly any effect of such noise on the DeepONet. We also compare theoretically the two neural operators and obtain similar error estimates for DeepONet and FNO under the same regularity assumptions.

preprint2021arXiv

A physics-informed neural network for quantifying the microstructure properties of polycrystalline Nickel using ultrasound data

We employ physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to quantify the microstructure of a polycrystalline Nickel by computing the spatial variation of compliance coefficients (compressibility, stiffness and rigidity) of the material. The PINN is supervised with realistic ultrasonic surface acoustic wavefield data acquired at an ultrasonic frequency of 5 MHz for the polycrystalline material. The ultrasonic wavefield data is represented as a deformation on the top surface of the material with the deformation measured using the method of laser vibrometry. The ultrasonic data is further complemented with wavefield data generated using a finite element based solver. The neural network is physically-informed by the in-plane and out-of-plane elastic wave equations and its convergence is accelerated using adaptive activation functions. The overarching goal of this work is to infer the spatial variation of compliance coefficients of materials using PINNs, which for ultrasound involves the spatially varying speed of the elastic waves. More broadly, the resulting PINN based surrogate model shows a promising approach for solving ill-posed inverse problems, often encountered in the non-destructive evaluation of materials.

preprint2021arXiv

Fractional Buffer Layers: Absorbing Boundary Conditions for Wave Propagation

We develop fractional buffer layers (FBLs) to absorb propagating waves without reflection in bounded domains. Our formulation is based on variable-order spatial fractional derivatives. We select a proper variable-order function so that dissipation is induced to absorb the coming waves in the buffer layers attached to the domain. In particular, we first design proper FBsL for the one-dimensional one-way and two-way wave propagation. Then, we extend our formulation to two-dimensional problems, where we introduce a consistent variable-order fractional wave equation. In each case, we obtain the fully discretized equations by employing a spectral collocation method in space and Crank-Nicolson or Adams-Bashforth method in time. We compare our results with the perfectly matched layer (PML) method and show the effectiveness of FBL in accurately suppressing any erroneously reflected waves, including corner reflections in two-dimensional rectangular domains. FBLs can be used in conjunction with any discretization method appropriate for fractional operators describing wave propagation in bounded or truncated domains.

preprint2021arXiv

GFINNs: GENERIC Formalism Informed Neural Networks for Deterministic and Stochastic Dynamical Systems

We propose the GENERIC formalism informed neural networks (GFINNs) that obey the symmetric degeneracy conditions of the GENERIC formalism. GFINNs comprise two modules, each of which contains two components. We model each component using a neural network whose architecture is designed to satisfy the required conditions. The component-wise architecture design provides flexible ways of leveraging available physics information into neural networks. We prove theoretically that GFINNs are sufficiently expressive to learn the underlying equations, hence establishing the universal approximation theorem. We demonstrate the performance of GFINNs in three simulation problems: gas containers exchanging heat and volume, thermoelastic double pendulum and the Langevin dynamics. In all the examples, GFINNs outperform existing methods, hence demonstrating good accuracy in predictions for both deterministic and stochastic systems.

preprint2021arXiv

Gradient-enhanced physics-informed neural networks for forward and inverse PDE problems

Deep learning has been shown to be an effective tool in solving partial differential equations (PDEs) through physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). PINNs embed the PDE residual into the loss function of the neural network, and have been successfully employed to solve diverse forward and inverse PDE problems. However, one disadvantage of the first generation of PINNs is that they usually have limited accuracy even with many training points. Here, we propose a new method, gradient-enhanced physics-informed neural networks (gPINNs), for improving the accuracy and training efficiency of PINNs. gPINNs leverage gradient information of the PDE residual and embed the gradient into the loss function. We tested gPINNs extensively and demonstrated the effectiveness of gPINNs in both forward and inverse PDE problems. Our numerical results show that gPINN performs better than PINN with fewer training points. Furthermore, we combined gPINN with the method of residual-based adaptive refinement (RAR), a method for improving the distribution of training points adaptively during training, to further improve the performance of gPINN, especially in PDEs with solutions that have steep gradients.

preprint2021arXiv

Learning Functional Priors and Posteriors from Data and Physics

We develop a new Bayesian framework based on deep neural networks to be able to extrapolate in space-time using historical data and to quantify uncertainties arising from both noisy and gappy data in physical problems. Specifically, the proposed approach has two stages: (1) prior learning and (2) posterior estimation. At the first stage, we employ the physics-informed Generative Adversarial Networks (PI-GAN) to learn a functional prior either from a prescribed function distribution, e.g., Gaussian process, or from historical data and physics. At the second stage, we employ the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) method to estimate the posterior in the latent space of PI-GANs. In addition, we use two different approaches to encode the physics: (1) automatic differentiation, used in the physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for scenarios with explicitly known partial differential equations (PDEs), and (2) operator regression using the deep operator network (DeepONet) for PDE-agnostic scenarios. We then test the proposed method for (1) meta-learning for one-dimensional regression, and forward/inverse PDE problems (combined with PINNs); (2) PDE-agnostic physical problems (combined with DeepONet), e.g., fractional diffusion as well as saturated stochastic (100-dimensional) flows in heterogeneous porous media; and (3) spatial-temporal regression problems, i.e., inference of a marine riser displacement field. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach can provide accurate predictions as well as uncertainty quantification given very limited scattered and noisy data, since historical data could be available to provide informative priors. In summary, the proposed method is capable of learning flexible functional priors, and can be extended to big data problems using stochastic HMC or normalizing flows since the latent space is generally characterized as low dimensional.

preprint2021arXiv

Measure-conditional Discriminator with Stationary Optimum for GANs and Statistical Distance Surrogates

We propose a simple but effective modification of the discriminators, namely measure-conditional discriminators, as a plug-and-play module for different GANs. By taking the generated distributions as part of input so that the target optimum for the discriminator is stationary, the proposed discriminator is more robust than the vanilla one. A variant of the measure-conditional discriminator can also handle multiple target distributions, or act as a surrogate model of statistical distances such as KL divergence with applications to transfer learning.

preprint2021arXiv

Meta-learning PINN loss functions

We propose a meta-learning technique for offline discovery of physics-informed neural network (PINN) loss functions. We extend earlier works on meta-learning, and develop a gradient-based meta-learning algorithm for addressing diverse task distributions based on parametrized partial differential equations (PDEs) that are solved with PINNs. Furthermore, based on new theory we identify two desirable properties of meta-learned losses in PINN problems, which we enforce by proposing a new regularization method or using a specific parametrization of the loss function. In the computational examples, the meta-learned losses are employed at test time for addressing regression and PDE task distributions. Our results indicate that significant performance improvement can be achieved by using a shared-among-tasks offline-learned loss function even for out-of-distribution meta-testing. In this case, we solve for test tasks that do not belong to the task distribution used in meta-training, and we also employ PINN architectures that are different from the PINN architecture used in meta-training. To better understand the capabilities and limitations of the proposed method, we consider various parametrizations of the loss function and describe different algorithm design options and how they may affect meta-learning performance.

preprint2021arXiv

Multiscale Parareal Algorithm for Long-Time Mesoscopic Simulations of Microvascular Blood Flow in Zebrafish

Various biological processes such as transport of oxygen and nutrients, thrombus formation, vascular angiogenesis and remodeling are related to cellular/subcellular level biological processes, where mesoscopic simulations resolving detailed cell dynamics provide a key to understanding and identifying the cellular basis of disease. To break this bottleneck and achieve a biologically meaningful timescale, we propose a multiscale parareal algorithm in which a continuum-based solver supervises a mesoscopic simulation in the time-domain. Using an iterative prediction-correction strategy, the parallel-in-time mesoscopic simulation supervised by its continuum-based counterpart can converge fast. The effectiveness of the proposed method is first verified in a time-dependent flow with a sinusoidal flowrate through a Y-shaped bifurcation channel. Physical quantities of interest including velocity, wall shear stress and flowrate are computed to compare against those of reference solutions, showing a less than 1% relative error on flowrate in the Newtonian flow and a less than 3\% relative error in the non-Newtonian blood flow. The proposed method is then applied to a large-scale mesoscopic simulation of microvessel blood flow in a zebrafish hindbrain for temporal acceleration. The time-dependent blood flow from heartbeats in this realistic vascular network of zebrafish hindbrain is simulated using dissipative particle dynamics as the mesoscopic model, which is supervised by a one-dimensional blood flow model (continuum-based model) in multiple temporal sub-domains. The computational analysis shows that the resulting microvessel blood flow converges to the reference solution after only two iterations. The proposed method is suitable for long-time mesoscopic simulations with complex fluids and geometries.

preprint2021arXiv

Physics-informed Neural Networks (PINNs) for Wave Propagation and Full Waveform Inversions

We propose a new approach to the solution of the wave propagation and full waveform inversions (FWIs) based on a recent advance in deep learning called Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). In this study, we present an algorithm for PINNs applied to the 2D acoustic wave equation and test the model with both forward wave propagation and FWIs case studies. These synthetic case studies are designed to explore the ability of PINNs to handle varying degrees of structural complexity using both teleseismic plane waves and seismic point sources. PINNs meshless formalism allows for a flexible implementation of the wave equation and different types of boundary conditions. For instance, our models demonstrate that PINN automatically satisfies absorbing boundary conditions, a serious computational challenge for common wave propagation solvers. Furthermore, a priori knowledge of the subsurface structure can be seamlessly encoded in PINNs formulation. We find that the current state-of-the-art PINNs provide good results for the forward model, even though spectral element or finite difference methods are more efficient and accurate. More importantly, our results demonstrate that PINNs yield excellent results for inversions on all cases considered and with limited computational complexity. Using PINNs as a geophysical inversion solver offers exciting perspectives, not only for the full waveform seismic inversions, but also when dealing with other geophysical datasets (e.g., magnetotellurics, gravity) as well as joint inversions because of its robust framework and simple implementation.

preprint2021arXiv

Simulating progressive intramural damage leading to aortic dissection using an operator-regression neural network

Aortic dissection progresses via delamination of the medial layer of the wall. Notwithstanding the complexity of this process, insight has been gleaned by studying in vitro and in silico the progression of dissection driven by quasi-static pressurization of the intramural space by fluid injection, which demonstrates that the differential propensity of dissection can be affected by spatial distributions of structurally significant interlamellar struts that connect adjacent elastic lamellae. In particular, diverse histological microstructures may lead to differential mechanical behavior during dissection, including the pressure--volume relationship of the injected fluid and the displacement field between adjacent lamellae. In this study, we develop a data-driven surrogate model for the delamination process for differential strut distributions using DeepONet, a new operator--regression neural network. The surrogate model is trained to predict the pressure--volume curve of the injected fluid and the damage progression field of the wall given a spatial distribution of struts, with in silico data generated with a phase-field finite element model. The results show that DeepONet can provide accurate predictions for diverse strut distributions, indicating that this composite branch-trunk neural network can effectively extract the underlying functional relationship between distinctive microstructures and their mechanical properties. More broadly, DeepONet can facilitate surrogate model-based analyses to quantify biological variability, improve inverse design, and predict mechanical properties based on multi-modality experimental data.

preprint2020arXiv

Active- and transfer-learning applied to microscale-macroscale coupling to simulate viscoelastic flows

Active- and transfer-learning are applied to polymer flows for the multiscale discovery of effective constitutive approximations required in viscoelastic flow simulation. The result is macroscopic rheology directly connected to a microstructural model. Micro and macroscale simulations are adaptively coupled by means of Gaussian process regression to run the expensive microscale computations only as necessary. This active-learning guided multiscale method can automatically detect the inaccuracy of the learned constitutive closure and initiate simulations at new sampling points informed by proper acquisition functions, leading to an autonomic microscale-macroscale coupled system. Also, we develop a new dissipative particle dynamics model with the range of interaction cutoff between particles allowed to vary with the local strain-rate invariant, which is able to capture both the shear-thinning viscosity and the normal stress difference functions consistent with rheological experiments for aqueous polyacrylamide solutions. Our numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of using active- and transfer-learning schemes to on-the-fly couple a spectral element solver and a mesoscopic particle-based simulator, and verify that the microscale-macroscale coupled model with effective constitutive closure learned from microscopic dynamics can outperform empirical constitutive models compared to experimental observations. The effective closure learned in a channel simulation is then transferred directly to the flow past a circular cylinder, where the results show that only two additional microscopic simulations are required to achieve a satisfactory constitutive model to once again close the continuum equations. This new paradigm of active- and transfer-learning for multiscale modeling is readily applicable to other microscale-macroscale coupled simulations of complex fluids and other materials.

preprint2020arXiv

Controlled release of entrapped nanoparticles from thermoresponsive hydrogels with tunable network characteristics

Thermoresponsive hydrogels have been studied intensively for creating smart drug carriers and controlled drug delivery. Understanding the drug release kinetics and corresponding transport mechanisms of nanoparticles (NPs) in a thermoresponsive hydrogel network is the key to the successful design of a smart drug delivery system. We construct a mesoscopic model of rigid NPs entrapped in a hydrogel network in an aqueous solution, where the hydrogel network is formed by cross-linked semiflexible polymers of PNIPAM. By varying the environmental temperature crossing the lower critical solution temperature of PNIPAM we can significantly change the hydrogel network characteristics. We systematically investigate how the matrix porosity and the nanoparticle size affect the NPs' transport kinetics at different temperatures. Quantitative results on the mean-squared displacement and the van Hove displacement distributions of NPs show that all NPs entrapped in the smart hydrogels undergo subdiffusion at both low and high temperatures. For a coil state, the subdiffusive exponent and the diffusion coefficient of NPs increase due to the increased kinetic energy and the decreased confinement on NPs, while the transport of NPs in the hydrogels can be also enhanced by decreasing the matrix porosity and NPs' size. However, when the solution temperature is increased above the critical temperature, the hydrogel network collapses following the coil-to-globule transition, with the NPs tightly trapped in some local regions inside the hydrogels. Consequently, the NP diffusion coefficient can be reduced by two orders of magnitude, or the diffusion processes can even be completely stopped. These findings provide new insights for designing controlled drug release from stimuli-responsive hydrogels, including autonomously switch on/off drug release to respond to the changes of the local environment.

preprint2020arXiv

Non-invasive Inference of Thrombus Material Properties with Physics-informed Neural Networks

We employ physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to infer properties of biological materials using synthetic data. In particular, we successfully apply PINNs on inferring the thrombus permeability and visco-elastic modulus from thrombus deformation data, which can be described by the fourth-order Cahn-Hilliard and Navier-Stokes Equations. In PINNs, the partial differential equations are encoded into the loss function, where partial derivatives can be obtained through automatic differentiation (AD). In addition, to tackling the challenge of calculating the fourth-order derivative in the Cahn-Hilliard equation with AD, we introduce an auxiliary network along with the main neural network to approximate the second-derivative of the energy potential term. Our model can predict simultaneously unknown parameters and velocity, pressure, and deformation gradient fields by merely training with partial information among all data, i.e., phase-field and pressure measurements, and is also highly flexible in sampling within the spatio-temporal domain for data acquisition. We validate our model by numerical solutions from the spectral/\textit{hp} element method (SEM) and demonstrate its robustness by training it with noisy measurements. Our results show that PINNs can accurately infer the material properties with noisy synthetic data, and thus they have great potential for inferring these properties from experimental multi-modality and multi-fidelity data.

preprint2020arXiv

NSFnets (Navier-Stokes Flow nets): Physics-informed neural networks for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations

We employ physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to simulate the incompressible flows ranging from laminar to turbulent flows. We perform PINN simulations by considering two different formulations of the Navier-Stokes equations: the velocity-pressure (VP) formulation and the vorticity-velocity (VV) formulation. We refer to these specific PINNs for the Navier-Stokes flow nets as NSFnets. Analytical solutions and direct numerical simulation (DNS) databases provide proper initial and boundary conditions for the NSFnet simulations. The spatial and temporal coordinates are the inputs of the NSFnets, while the instantaneous velocity and pressure fields are the outputs for the VP-NSFnet, and the instantaneous velocity and vorticity fields are the outputs for the VV-NSFnet. These two different forms of the Navier-Stokes equations together with the initial and boundary conditions are embedded into the loss function of the PINNs. No data is provided for the pressure to the VP-NSFnet, which is a hidden state and is obtained via the incompressibility constraint without splitting the equations. We obtain good accuracy of the NSFnet simulation results upon convergence of the loss function, verifying that NSFnets can effectively simulate complex incompressible flows using either the VP or the VV formulations. We also perform a systematic study on the weights used in the loss function for the data/physics components and investigate a new way of computing the weights dynamically to accelerate training and enhance accuracy. Our results suggest that the accuracy of NSFnets, for both laminar and turbulent flows, can be improved with proper tuning of weights (manual or dynamic) in the loss function.

preprint2020arXiv

Physics-informed neural network for ultrasound nondestructive quantification of surface breaking cracks

We introduce an optimized physics-informed neural network (PINN) trained to solve the problem of identifying and characterizing a surface breaking crack in a metal plate. PINNs are neural networks that can combine data and physics in the learning process by adding the residuals of a system of Partial Differential Equations to the loss function. Our PINN is supervised with realistic ultrasonic surface acoustic wave data acquired at a frequency of 5 MHz. The ultrasonic surface wave data is represented as a surface deformation on the top surface of a metal plate, measured by using the method of laser vibrometry. The PINN is physically informed by the acoustic wave equation and its convergence is sped up using adaptive activation functions. The adaptive activation function uses a scalable hyperparameter in the activation function, which is optimized to achieve best performance of the network as it changes dynamically the topology of the loss function involved in the optimization process. The usage of adaptive activation function significantly improves the convergence, notably observed in the current study. We use PINNs to estimate the speed of sound of the metal plate, which we do with an error of 1\%, and then, by allowing the speed of sound to be space dependent, we identify and characterize the crack as the positions where the speed of sound has decreased. Our study also shows the effect of sub-sampling of the data on the sensitivity of sound speed estimates. More broadly, the resulting model shows a promising deep neural network model for ill-posed inverse problems.

preprint2020arXiv

Physics-informed neural networks for inverse problems in nano-optics and metamaterials

In this paper we employ the emerging paradigm of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for the solution of representative inverse scattering problems in photonic metamaterials and nano-optics technologies. In particular, we successfully apply mesh-free PINNs to the difficult task of retrieving the effective permittivity parameters of a number of finite-size scattering systems that involve many interacting nanostructures as well as multi-component nanoparticles. Our methodology is fully validated by numerical simulations based on the Finite Element Method (FEM). The development of physics-informed deep learning techniques for inverse scattering can enable the design of novel functional nanostructures and significantly broaden the design space of metamaterials by naturally accounting for radiation and finite-size effects beyond the limitations of traditional effective medium theories.

preprint2020arXiv

Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Nonhomogeneous Material Identification in Elasticity Imaging

We apply Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) for solving identification problems of nonhomogeneous materials. We focus on the problem with a background in elasticity imaging, where one seeks to identify the nonhomogeneous mechanical properties of soft tissue based on the full-field displacement measurements under quasi-static loading. In our model, we apply two independent neural networks, one for approximating the solution of the corresponding forward problem, and the other for approximating the unknown material parameter field. As a proof of concept, we validate our model on a prototypical plane strain problem for incompressible hyperelastic tissue. The results show that the PINNs are effective in accurately recovering the unknown distribution of mechanical properties. By employing two neural networks in our model, we extend the capability of material identification of PINNs to include nonhomogeneous material parameter fields, which enables more flexibility of PINNs in representing complex material properties.

preprint2020arXiv

Reinforcement Learning for Active Flow Control in Experiments

We demonstrate experimentally the feasibility of applying reinforcement learning (RL) in flow control problems by automatically discovering active control strategies without any prior knowledge of the flow physics. We consider the turbulent flow past a circular cylinder with the aim of reducing the cylinder drag force or maximizing the power gain efficiency by properly selecting the rotational speed of two small diameter cylinders, parallel to and located downstream of the larger cylinder. Given properly designed rewards and noise reduction techniques, after tens of towing experiments, the RL agent could discover the optimal control strategy, comparable to the optimal static control. While RL has been found to be effective in recent computer flow simulation studies, this is the first time that its effectiveness is demonstrated experimentally, paving the way for exploring new optimal active flow control strategies in complex fluid mechanics applications.

preprint2020arXiv

Solving Inverse Stochastic Problems from Discrete Particle Observations Using the Fokker-Planck Equation and Physics-informed Neural Networks

The Fokker-Planck (FP) equation governing the evolution of the probability density function (PDF) is applicable to many disciplines but it requires specification of the coefficients for each case, which can be functions of space-time and not just constants, hence requiring the development of a data-driven modeling approach. When the data available is directly on the PDF, then there exist methods for inverse problems that can be employed to infer the coefficients and thus determine the FP equation and subsequently obtain its solution. Herein, we address a more realistic scenario, where only sparse data are given on the particles' positions at a few time instants, which are not sufficient to accurately construct directly the PDF even at those times from existing methods, e.g., kernel estimation algorithms. To this end, we develop a general framework based on physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) that introduces a new loss function using the Kullback-Leibler divergence to connect the stochastic samples with the FP equation, to simultaneously learn the equation and infer the multi-dimensional PDF at all times. In particular, we consider two types of inverse problems, type I where the FP equation is known but the initial PDF is unknown, and type II in which, in addition to unknown initial PDF, the drift and diffusion terms are also unknown. In both cases, we investigate problems with either Brownian or Levy noise or a combination of both. We demonstrate the new PINN framework in detail in the one-dimensional case (1D) but we also provide results for up to 5D demonstrating that we can infer both the FP equation and} dynamics simultaneously at all times with high accuracy using only very few discrete observations of the particles.

preprint2020arXiv

SympNets: Intrinsic structure-preserving symplectic networks for identifying Hamiltonian systems

We propose new symplectic networks (SympNets) for identifying Hamiltonian systems from data based on a composition of linear, activation and gradient modules. In particular, we define two classes of SympNets: the LA-SympNets composed of linear and activation modules, and the G-SympNets composed of gradient modules. Correspondingly, we prove two new universal approximation theorems that demonstrate that SympNets can approximate arbitrary symplectic maps based on appropriate activation functions. We then perform several experiments including the pendulum, double pendulum and three-body problems to investigate the expressivity and the generalization ability of SympNets. The simulation results show that even very small size SympNets can generalize well, and are able to handle both separable and non-separable Hamiltonian systems with data points resulting from short or long time steps. In all the test cases, SympNets outperform the baseline models, and are much faster in training and prediction. We also develop an extended version of SympNets to learn the dynamics from irregularly sampled data. This extended version of SympNets can be thought of as a universal model representing the solution to an arbitrary Hamiltonian system.

preprint2019arXiv

A composite neural network that learns from multi-fidelity data: Application to function approximation and inverse PDE problems

We propose a new composite neural network (NN) that can be trained based on multi-fidelity data. It is comprised of three NNs, with the first NN trained using the low-fidelity data and coupled to two high-fidelity NNs, one with activation functions and another one without, in order to discover and exploit nonlinear and linear correlations, respectively, between the low-fidelity and the high-fidelity data. We first demonstrate the accuracy of the new multi-fidelity NN for approximating some standard benchmark functions but also a 20-dimensional function. Subsequently, we extend the recently developed physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to be trained with multi-fidelity data sets (MPINNs). MPINNs contain four fully-connected neural networks, where the first one approximates the low-fidelity data, while the second and third construct the correlation between the low- and high-fidelity data and produce the multi-fidelity approximation, which is then used in the last NN that encodes the partial differential equations (PDEs). Specifically, in the two high-fidelity NNs a relaxation parameter is introduced, which can be optimized to combine the linear and nonlinear sub-networks. By optimizing this parameter, the present model is capable of learning both the linear and complex nonlinear correlations between the low- and high-fidelity data adaptively. By training the MPINNs, we can:(1) obtain the correlation between the low- and high-fidelity data, (2) infer the quantities of interest based on a few scattered data, and (3) identify the unknown parameters in the PDEs. In particular, we employ the MPINNs to learn the hydraulic conductivity field for unsaturated flows as well as the reactive models for reactive transport. The results demonstrate that MPINNs can achieve relatively high accuracy based on a very small set of high-fidelity data.

preprint2019arXiv

A stabilized semi-implicit Fourier spectral method for nonlinear space-fractional reaction-diffusion equations

The reaction-diffusion model can generate a wide variety of spatial patterns, which has been widely applied in chemistry, biology, and physics, even used to explain self-regulated pattern formation in the developing animal embryo. In this work, a second-order stabilized semi-implicit time-stepping Fourier spectral method is presented for the reaction-diffusion systems of equations with space described by the fractional Laplacian. We adopt the temporal-spatial error splitting argument to illustrate that the proposed method is stable without imposing the CFL condition, and we prove an optimal L2-error estimate. We also analyze the linear stability of the stabilized semi-implicit method and obtain a practical criterion to choose the time step size to guarantee the stability of the semi-implicit method. Our approach is illustrated by solving several problems of practical interest, including the fractional Allen-Cahn, Gray-Scott and FitzHugh-Nagumo models, together with an analysis of the properties of these systems in terms of the fractional power of the underlying Laplacian operator, which are quite different from the patterns of the corresponding integer-order model.

preprint2019arXiv

Adaptive activation functions accelerate convergence in deep and physics-informed neural networks

We employ adaptive activation functions for regression in deep and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to approximate smooth and discontinuous functions as well as solutions of linear and nonlinear partial differential equations. In particular, we solve the nonlinear Klein-Gordon equation, which has smooth solutions, the nonlinear Burgers equation, which can admit high gradient solutions, and the Helmholtz equation. We introduce a scalable hyper-parameter in the activation function, which can be optimized to achieve best performance of the network as it changes dynamically the topology of the loss function involved in the optimization process. The adaptive activation function has better learning capabilities than the traditional one (fixed activation) as it improves greatly the convergence rate, especially at early training, as well as the solution accuracy. To better understand the learning process, we plot the neural network solution in the frequency domain to examine how the network captures successively different frequency bands present in the solution. We consider both forward problems, where the approximate solutions are obtained, as well as inverse problems, where parameters involved in the governing equation are identified. Our simulation results show that the proposed method is a very simple and effective approach to increase the efficiency, robustness and accuracy of the neural network approximation of nonlinear functions as well as solutions of partial differential equations, especially for forward problems.

preprint2019arXiv

PPINN: Parareal Physics-Informed Neural Network for time-dependent PDEs

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) encode physical conservation laws and prior physical knowledge into the neural networks, ensuring the correct physics is represented accurately while alleviating the need for supervised learning to a great degree. While effective for relatively short-term time integration, when long time integration of the time-dependent PDEs is sought, the time-space domain may become arbitrarily large and hence training of the neural network may become prohibitively expensive. To this end, we develop a parareal physics-informed neural network (PPINN), hence decomposing a long-time problem into many independent short-time problems supervised by an inexpensive/fast coarse-grained (CG) solver. In particular, the serial CG solver is designed to provide approximate predictions of the solution at discrete times, while initiate many fine PINNs simultaneously to correct the solution iteratively. There is a two-fold benefit from training PINNs with small-data sets rather than working on a large-data set directly, i.e., training of individual PINNs with small-data is much faster, while training the fine PINNs can be readily parallelized. Consequently, compared to the original PINN approach, the proposed PPINN approach may achieve a significant speedup for long-time integration of PDEs, assuming that the CG solver is fast and can provide reasonable predictions of the solution, hence aiding the PPINN solution to converge in just a few iterations. To investigate the PPINN performance on solving time-dependent PDEs, we first apply the PPINN to solve the Burgers equation, and subsequently we apply the PPINN to solve a two-dimensional nonlinear diffusion-reaction equation. Our results demonstrate that PPINNs converge in a couple of iterations with significant speed-ups proportional to the number of time-subdomains employed.

preprint2018arXiv

Self-cleaning of hydrophobic rough surfaces by coalescence-induced wetting transition

The superhydrophobic leaves of a lotus plant and other natural surfaces with self-cleaning function have been studied intensively for the development of artificial biomimetic surfaces. Surface roughness generated by hierarchical structures is a crucial property required for superhydrophobicity and self-cleaning. Here, we demonstrate a novel self-cleaning mechanism of textured surfaces attributed to a spontaneous coalescence-induced wetting transition. We focus on the wetting transition as it represents a new mechanism, which can explain why droplets on rough surfaces are able to change from the highly adhesive Wenzel state to the low-adhesion Cassie-Baxter state and achieve self-cleaning. In particular, we perform many-body dissipative particle dynamics simulations of liquid droplets sitting on mechanically textured substrates. We quantitatively investigate the wetting behavior of an isolated droplet as well as coalescence of droplets for both Cassie-Baxter and Wenzel states. Our simulation results reveal that droplets in the Cassie-Baxter state have much lower contact angle hysteresis and smaller hydrodynamic resistance than droplets in the Wenzel state. When small neighboring droplets coalesce into bigger ones on textured hydrophobic substrates, we observe a spontaneous wetting transition from a Wenzel state to a Cassie-Baxter state, which is powered by the surface energy released upon coalescence of the droplets. For superhydrophobic surfaces, the released surface energy may be sufficient to cause a jumping motion of droplets off the surface, in which case adding one more droplet to coalescence may increase the jumping velocity by one order of magnitude. When multiple droplets are involved, we find that the spatial distribution of liquid components in the coalesced droplet can be controlled by properly designing the overall arrangement of droplets and the distance between them.

preprint2017arXiv

Active learning of constitutive relation from mesoscopic dynamics for macroscopic modeling of non-Newtonian flows

We simulate complex fluids by means of an on-the-fly coupling of the bulk rheology to the underlying microstructure dynamics. In particular, a macroscopic continuum model of polymeric fluids is constructed without a pre-specified constitutive relation, but instead it is actively learned from mesoscopic simulations where the dynamics of polymer chains is explicitly computed. To couple the macroscopic rheology of polymeric fluids and the microscale dynamics of polymer chains, the continuum approach (based on the finite volume method) provides the transient flow field as inputs for the (mesoscopic) dissipative particle dynamics (DPD), and in turn DPD returns an effective constitutive relation to close the continuum equations. In this multiscale modeling procedure, we employ an active learning strategy based on Gaussian process regression (GPR) to minimize the number of expensive DPD simulations, where adaptively selected DPD simulations are performed only as necessary. Numerical experiments are carried out for flow past a circular cylinder of a non-Newtonian fluid, modeled at the mesoscopic level by bead-spring chains. The results show that only five DPD simulations are required to achieve an effective closure of the continuum equations at Reynolds number Re=10. Furthermore, when Re is increased to 100, only one additional DPD simulation is required for constructing an extended GPR-informed model closure. Compared to traditional message-passing multiscale approaches, applying an active learning scheme to multiscale modeling of non-Newtonian fluids can significantly increase the computational efficiency. Although the method demonstrated here obtains only a local viscosity from the mesoscopic model, it can be extended to other multiscale models of complex fluids whose macro-rheology is unknown.

preprint2016arXiv

A dissipative particle dynamics method for arbitrarily complex geometries

We present a local detection method for dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) involving arbitrarily shaped geometric three-dimensional domains. By introducing an indicator variable of boundary volume fraction (BVF) for each fluid particle, the boundary of arbitrary-shape objects is detected on-the-fly for the moving fluid particles using only the local particle configuration. Therefore, this approach eliminates the need of an analytical description of the boundary and geometry of objects in DPD simulations and makes it possible to load the geometry of a system directly from experimental images or computer-aided designs/drawings. Wall penetration is inferred from the value of the BVF and prevented by a predictor-corrector algorithm. The no-slip boundary condition is achieved by employing effective dissipative coefficients for liquid-solid interactions. Quantitative evaluations of the new method are performed for the plane Poiseuille flow, the plane Couette flow and the Wannier flow in a cylindrical domain and compared with their corresponding analytical solutions and (high-order) spectral element solution of the Navier-Stokes equations. We verify that the proposed method yields correct no-slip boundary condition for velocity and generates negligible fluctuations of density and temperature in the vicinity of the wall surface. Moreover, we construct a very complex 3D geometry - the "Brown Pacman" microfluidic device - to explicitly demonstrate how to construct a DPD system with complex geometry directly from loading a graphical image. In addition to stationary arbitrary-shape objects, the new method is particularly useful for problems involving moving and deformable boundaries, because it only uses local information of neighboring particles and satisfies the desired boundary conditions on-the-fly.