Learning composable energy surrogates for PDE order reduction

Alex Beatson, Jordan T. Ash, Geoffrey Roeder, Tianju Xue, Ryan P. Adams

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

Meta-materials are an important emerging class of engineered materials in which complex macroscopic behaviour–whether electromagnetic, thermal, or mechanical–arises from modular substructure. Simulation and optimization of these materials are computationally challenging, as rich substructures necessitate high-fidelity finite element meshes to solve the governing PDEs. To address this, we leverage parametric modular structure to learn component-level surrogates, enabling cheaper high-fidelity simulation. We use a neural network to model the stored potential energy in a component given boundary conditions. This yields a structured prediction task: macroscopic behavior is determined by the minimizer of the system’s total potential energy, which can be approximated by composing these surrogate models. Composable energy surrogates thus permit simulation in the reduced basis of component boundaries. Costly ground-truth simulation of the full structure is avoided, as training data are generated by performing finite element analysis of individual components. Using dataset aggregation to choose training data allows us to learn energy surrogates which produce accurate macroscopic behavior when composed, accelerating simulation of parametric meta-materials.

Original languageEnglish (US)
JournalAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Volume2020-December
StatePublished - 2020
Event34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2020 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Dec 6 2020Dec 12 2020

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Signal Processing

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