In a previous work (Elaarabi et al., 2025b), the Sequence Encoder for online dynamical system identification (Elaarabi et al., 2025a) and its combination with PINN (PINN-SE) were introduced and tested on both synthetic and real data case scenarios. The sequence encoder is able to effectively encode time series into feature vectors, which the PINN then uses to map to dynamical behavior, predicting system response under changes in parameters, ICs and BCs. Previously (Elaarabi et al., 2025b), the tests on real data were limited to simple 1D problems and only 1D time series inputs of the Sequence Encoder. In this work, the possibility of applying PINN-SE to a more realistic case is investigated: heating and early cooling of the thermo-stamping process, which is a critical stage in the forming process of continuous fiber reinforced composite materials with thermoplastic polymer. The possibility of extending the PINN-SE inputs to multimodal data, such as sequences of temporal 2D images and to scenarios involving variable geometries, is also explored. The results show that combining multiple encoders with the previously proposed method (Elaarabi et al., 2025b) is feasible, we also show that training the model on synthetic data generated based on experimental data can help the model to generalize well for real experimental data, unseen during the training phase.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of the setup used to validate PINN-SE. This setup includes the three main steps of the thermo-stamping process, focusing only on the thermal evolution. An IR camera is mounted in a fixed position above the mold using a support arm, while the mold is actuated using a hydraulic cylinder and controlled by a control unit. The steps can be summarized as follows: (a) The sheet is first heated to a certain temperature Th using an infrared (IR) oven. (b) The sheet is then taken out of the oven, where it is exposed to natural convection during the transfer phase . (c) Finally a cold mold is raised to establish thermal contact, emulating the cooling step of the stamping phase.
Material
Fiber
Polymer Matrix
Thickness (mm)
Fabric
Warp to Weft Ratio
Number of Plies
PA66GF
E-glass
PA66
1.5±0.008
Twill
2/2
3
PPGF
E-glass
PP
2.3±0.05
Twill
2/2
2
Table 1: Summary of sheets: fiber type, polymer matrix, thickness, fabric type, warp-to-weft ratio and number of plies.
Property
E-glass
PP
PA66
Units
Density ( ρ )
2580
910
1140
kg/m 3
Specific Heat Capacity ( Cp )
830
1610
1460
J/(kg ⋅ K)
Thermal Conductivity ( λ )
1.0
0.22
0.2
W/(m ⋅ K)
Table 2: Material properties of E-glass Fiber [ 20 ] , PP [ 21 , 22 ] and PA66 [ 21 , 22 ] .
Figure 2: Top view of the mold geometry and thermocouple positions.
Figure 3: Top view of Temperature patterns after heating of the PA66GF and PPGF sheets of the samples used in these experiments .
Figure 4: Top view of temperature patterns at the surface 15 seconds after contact with the mold of the PA66GF and PPGF sheets for all the samples used in this experiments .
Figure 5: Illustration of heat transfer between two surfaces with asperities. The thermal contact resistance defines the quality of the contact and consequently the efficiency of heat transfer.
Figure 6: Example of the top view normalized temperature difference , normalized(TinitH−TendH) , for PPGF sheets used to approximate the contact heat transfer coefficient hc .
Figure 7: The Quality of Contact representation for all PA66GF sheets experiments.
Figure 8: The Quality of Contact representation for all PPGF sheets experiments.
Figure 9: Example of data generated by simulation versus a processed experimental data .
Figure 10: Overview of the CNN-VAE architecture.
Figure 11: Examples of the QC generated using the VAE model.
Figure 12: An overview of the PINN-SE architecture used in this application. The PINN-SE can be divided into three parts. The Encoder is composed of four sub modules: the first encodes a sequence of images representing the temperature during the convection phase of the process (part (b) in Fig. 1 ) using a CNN and Deep Sets. The second model is a CNN that encodes the Quality of Contact, QC∈RH×W×C . The third and fourth models are simple MLPs that encode mold coordinates, sheet thickness and initial contact temperature. Each model produces a feature vector Fi∈RB×fi , i∈{1,2,3,4} , which are concatenated to form Z∈RB×(∑i=14fi) . The second main part is the Space-time Encoder, which encodes spatio-temporal data into Query Points using Fourier feature layers [ 28 ] and an MLP. The final part is the PINN, which takes the concatenation of QPs and Z as input. In this work, two MLP are used and their outputs are summed to give the final temperature prediction.
Figure 13: Model performance across different spatial locations ( z=4kHk∈{0,1,2,3,4} and t=\frac{k{\color[rgb]{0,0,0}t_{f}}}{10}\hskip 9.24994ptk\in\{0,2,5,7,10\} ), using MAE metrics and using only 2 thermal images as input to the encoder. The figure summarizes the mean, median and 90th percentile errors of the model, as defined in Eq. 14 , across all validation datasets.
Figure 14: Model performance across different spatial locations ( z=4kHk∈{0,1,2,3,4} and t=\frac{k{\color[rgb]{0,0,0}t_{f}}}{10}\hskip 9.24994ptk\in\{0,2,5,7,10\} ), using MAPE (in %) metric and using only 2 thermal images as input to the encoder. The table summarizes the mean and 90th percentile errors of the model, as defined in Eq. 13 , across all validation datasets.
Figure 15: Exemple of model results of top view surface temperature for validation dataset at z=4H and t=\frac{k{\color[rgb]{0,0,0}t_{f}}}{10}\hskip 9.24994ptk\in\{0,2,5,7,10\} (columns), the first line represents the model prediction, the second presents the simulation results (ground truth) and the last one represents the Absolute Error between prediction and simulation.
Figure 16: Exemple of model results of top view surface temperature for validation dataset at z=43H and t=\frac{k{\color[rgb]{0,0,0}t_{f}}}{10}\hskip 9.24994ptk\in\{0,2,5,7,10\} (columns), the first line represents the model prediction, the second presents the simulation results (ground truth) and the last one represents the Absolute Error between prediction and simulation.
Figure 17: Model performance for PA66GF sheet experiments, across different instances t=\frac{k{\color[rgb]{0,0,0}t_{f}}}{10}\hskip 9.24994ptk\in\{0,2,4,6,8,10\} and z=H , using AE metric and using 4 thermal images as input to the encoder. The figure summarizes the mean, median and 90th percentile of AE of the model as given in Eq. 16 .
Figure 18: Model performance for PA66GF sheet experiments, across different instances t=\frac{k{\color[rgb]{0,0,0}t_{f}}}{10}\hskip 9.24994ptk\in\{0,2,4,6,8,10\} and z=H , using APE metric and using 4 thermal images as input to the encoder. The figure summarizes the mean, median and 90th percentile of APE of the model as given in Eq. 15 .
Figure 19: Model performance for PPGF sheet experiments, across different instances t=\frac{k{\color[rgb]{0,0,0}t_{f}}}{10}\hskip 9.24994ptk\in\{0,2,4,6,8,10\} and z=H , using AE metric and using 4 thermal images as input to the encoder. The figure summarizes the mean, median and 90th percentile of AE of the model as given in Eq. 16 .
Figure 20: Model performance for PPGF sheet experiments, across different instances t=\frac{k{\color[rgb]{0,0,0}t_{f}}}{10}\hskip 9.24994ptk\in\{0,2,4,6,8,10\} and z=H , using APE metric and using 4 thermal images as input to the encoder. The figure summarizes the mean, median and 90th percentile of APE of the model as given in Eq. 15 .
Figure 21: Example of model results of top view surface temperature for PPGF sheet sample at z=H and t=\frac{k{\color[rgb]{0,0,0}t_{f}}}{10}\hskip 9.24994ptk\in\{0,2,4,6,8,10\} (columns). The first line represents the thermal images from experiment (ground truth), the second represents the model prediction, the third represents the Absolute Percentage Error (0-1) and the last line represents APE>0.12 (binary values 0 or 1).
Appendix figures & tables10 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Stage
Layer
Activation
Encoder
Input
Input (161,161)
–
Conv2D + MaxPool
32 filters, 3 × 3 same padding, pool (2,2)
swish
Conv2D + MaxPool
64 filters, 3 × 3 same padding, pool (2,2)
swish
Conv2D + MaxPool
128 filters, 3 × 3 same padding, pool (2,2)
swish
Flatten
–
–
Appendix
Table 3: CNN-VAE Architecture for ICs Configuration
Stage
Layer
Activation
Encoder
Input
Input (91,59)
–
Conv2D + MaxPool
32 filters, 3 × 3 same padding, pool (2,2)
swish
Conv2D + MaxPool
64 filters, 3 × 3 same padding, pool (2,2)
swish
Conv2D + MaxPool
128 filters, 3 × 3 same padding, pool (2,2)
swish
Flatten
–
–
Appendix
Table 4: CNN-VAE Architecture for QC Configuration
Stage
Layer
Activation
Input
Input (161,161)
–
Conv2D + MaxPool
32 filters, 3 × 3 same padding, pool (2,2)
swish
Conv2D + MaxPool
64 filters, 3 × 3 same padding, pool (2,2)
swish
Conv2D + MaxPool
128 filters, 3 × 3 same padding, pool (2,2)
swish
Flatten
–
–
Dense ×4
32 nodes each
swish
Appendix
Table 5: CNN Encoder for ICs Configuration (PINN-SE).
Stage
Layer
Activation
Input
Input (sequence size, 9 features)
–
Dense
64 nodes with L1 regularization layer
swish
Dense
64 nodes with L1 regularization layer
swish
Dense
64 nodes with L1 regularization layer
swish
Dense (output)
32 nodes with L1 regularization layer
–
Aggregation
Max pooling across time dimension
–
Appendix
Table 6: Deep Set Architecture.
Stage
Layer
Activation
Input
Input (91,59)
–
Conv2D + MaxPool
32 filters, 3 × 3 same padding, pool (2,2)
swish
Conv2D + MaxPool
64 filters, 3 × 3 same padding, pool (2,2)
swish
Conv2D + MaxPool
128 filters, 3 × 3 same padding, pool (2,2)
swish
Flatten
–
–
Dense ×4
64 nodes each
swish
Appendix
Table 7: CNN Encoder for QC Configuration (PINN-SE).
Stage
Layer
Activation
Input
Input (2 features)
–
Dense
64 nodes with L1 regularization layer
swish
Dense
64 nodes with L1 regularization layer
swish
Dense (output)
32 nodes with L1 regularization layer
–
Appendix
Table 8: Thickness and initial mold temperature MLP Architecture.
Stage
Layer
Activation
Input
Input (16 features)
–
Dense
64 nodes with L1 regularization layer
swish
Dense
64 nodes with L1 regularization layer
swish
Dense (output)
32 nodes with L1 regularization layer
–
Appendix
Table 9: Polygon coordinates Model Architecture.
Stage
Layer
Activation
Input
Input (104 features)
–
Dense
128 nodes with L1 regularization layer
swish
Dense
128 nodes with L1 regularization layer
swish
Dense (output)
64 nodes with L1 regularization layer
linear
Appendix
Table 10: Post feature encoding MLP Architecture.
Stage
Layer
Activation
Fourier Features
Random Fourier Features, 30 nodes (scale = 0.1)
–
Concatenate
–
–
Input
Input (32 features)
–
Dense
100 nodes with L1 regularization layer
swish
Dense
100 nodes with L1 regularization layer
swish
Dense (output)
32 nodes with L1 regularization layer
–
Appendix
Table 11: Space-time Encoder Architecture with Fourier Features layer.
Accurate thermal modeling is essential in metal additive manufacturing (AM) for understanding the process-structure-property chain. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) offer effective surrogate thermal modeling by minimizing physics-based residual losses at collocation points. However, prior works typically rely on manually-crafted, static collocation sampling strategies, which are neither principled nor scalable across process conditions, hindering their generalization capability. In this work, we provide theoretical analysis through empirical risk minimization, showing that process condition-aware adaptive sampling is strictly more favorable than conventional static sampling for generalization. Building on this insight, we propose an adaptive sampling strategy within a two-stage framework: (1) a conditional Flow Matching model that learns approximate high-residual distributions across different process conditions, and (2) a mixed sampling strategy combining this distribution with a domain-informed base distribution to generate adaptive collocation points for refining the PINN predictor. Experiments on metal AM numerical benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art PINN baselines, achieving an average 62.1% reduction in relative L2 error under an identical collocation budget, by capturing process-dependent heat dissipation regions often overlooked in the literature. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first adaptive sampling strategy for PINNs in metal AM, contributing to the enhanced generalization and broader applicability.
Hyeonsu Lee, Jihoon Jeong
Wm Michael Barnes ’64 Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843, USA
Accurate thermal modeling in metal additive manufacturing (AM) is essential for understanding the process-structure-performance relationship. While prior studies have explored generalization across unseen process conditions, they often require extensive datasets, costly retraining, or pre-training. Generalization across different materials also remains relatively unexplored due to the challenges posed by distinct material-dependent thermal behaviors. This paper introduces a parametric physics-informed neural network (PINN) framework for zero-shot generalization across arbitrary materials without labeled data, retraining, or pre-training. The framework adopts a decoupled parametric PINN architecture that separately encodes material properties and spatiotemporal coordinates, fusing them through conditional modulation to better align with the multiplicative role of material parameters in the governing equation and boundary conditions. Physics-guided output scaling derived from Rosenthal's analytical solution and a hybrid optimization strategy are further incorporated to enhance physical consistency, training stability, and convergence. Experiments on bare plate laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) across diverse metal alloys, including both in-distribution and out-of-distribution cases, demonstrate effective zero-shot generalizability along with superior training efficiency. Specifically, the proposed framework achieved up to a 64.2% reduction in relative L2 error compared to the non-parametric baseline while surpassing its performance within only 4.4% of the baseline training epochs. Ablation studies confirm that the proposed framework's components are broadly applicable to other PINN-based approaches. Overall, the proposed framework provides an efficient and scalable material-agnostic solution for zero-shot thermal modeling, contributing to more flexible and practical deployment in metal AM.
Hyeonsu Lee, Jihoon Jeong
Wm Michael Barnes ’64 Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843, USA
Physics-informed neural network (PINN) training minimizes a weighted combination of partial differential equation (PDE), boundary-condition, and initial-condition losses. Because adaptive methods modify these weights during training, their weighted total losses are not always directly comparable. We compare fixed-weight PINN, gradient-normalized PINN (GNPINN), and a rule-based adaptive controller (AgenticPINN) under matched settings on a heat-equation benchmark and a simplified Czochralski-oriented thermal-fluid problem. In the crystal-growth MLP experiment, adaptive control reduced the PDE residual from the order of 10−5 to 10−6, while the boundary-condition loss increased from the order of 10−5 to 10−2. On the heat-equation benchmark, GNPINN achieved the lowest relative L2 field error (0.054), whereas AgenticPINN obtained the smallest PDE residual but a relative L2 error of 1.368. Gaussian-process surrogates were additionally evaluated using case-wise holdout tests on corrected Czochralski CFD parameter sweeps. The temperature-field error for the temperature sweep was approximately 6%, whereas the axial-velocity error for the crystal-rotation sweep was approximately 42%. These findings show that adaptive control can improve equation satisfaction while weakening other physical constraints. PINN training should therefore be evaluated using separate PDE, boundary-condition, and solution-error metrics rather than weighted total loss alone.