Computational Fluid Dynamics

Also known as CFD

Overview

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) uses numerical methods to solve equations describing fluid motion, turbulence, heat transfer, and related processes. Finite-volume and finite-element solvers, alongside RANS, LES, and DNS, provide established ways to simulate flows; neural operators, graph networks, physics-informed neural networks, and generative models are increasingly used as surrogates or for reconstruction. These approaches can reduce the cost of simulation, support design and flow control, and infer fields from sparse measurements. A central challenge is balancing speed with physical consistency and reliable generalization across geometries and regimes, especially over long predictions; learned models still need validation against trusted simulations and experiments.

Latest papers

279 papers37 papers in the last four weeks, up 9% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Apr 30, 2026

Acceleration of horizontal numerical advection for atmospheric modeling through surrogate modeling with temporal coarse-graining

Machine-learned surrogate modeling of advection may accelerate geoscientific models, but existing approaches have either achieved limited speedup or have sacrificed spatial resolution compared to the model they are trained to emulate. We developed a machine-learned solver that speeds up advection simulations without sacrificing spatial resolution through the use of temporal coarse-graining, where the model is trained to take larger integration steps than dictated by the Courant-Friedrich-Lewy (CFL) condition. Our solver framework includes a convolutional neural network that takes concentrations and CFL numbers as inputs and outputs mass flux. Our solvers emulate 10-day ground-level horizontal advection simulations with r2^2 values against the baseline ranging from 0.60--0.98 with temporal coarsening factors of 4 to 32 times the baseline integration time step. Speed increases and accuracy decreases with increased coarsening, with r2=0.24r^2 = 0.24 in accuracy lost for every factor of 10 gained in speed, reaching a maximum 92×\times speedup while maintaining r2=0.60r^2 = 0.60. We deliberately trained our solvers only on January ground-level wind data to examine their ability to generalize across seasons and vertical heights. The 4×\times-coarsened learned solver successfully reproduces simulations over 72 vertical levels. The 8×\times--16×\times solvers (but not 32×\times) emulate most vertical levels. The learned solvers also generalize well across seasons, except for instabilities in June and October. With additional fine-tuning, these learned solvers could be appropriate for operational use where trading accuracy for speed could be advantageous, such as in screening tools, in ensemble simulations, or with data assimilation.
Apr 30, 2026

RETO: A Rotary-Enhanced Transformer Operator for High-Fidelity Prediction of Automotive Aerodynamics

Rapid aerodynamic evaluation is crucial for modern vehicle design, yet existing neural operators struggle to capture intricate spatial correlations. We propose the rotary-enhanced transformer operator (RETO), a novel neural solver featuring a dual-stage spatial awareness mechanism: sinusoidal-cosine encodings for global referencing and rotary positional encodings (RoPE) for relative displacements. RoPE encodes spatial relations via unitary rotations, enforcing translation invariance and enhancing local gradient resolution. RETO is validated on ShapeNet and the high-fidelity DrivAerML benchmark. On ShapeNet, RETO achieves a relative L2L_2 error of 0.063, outperforming RegDGCNN at 0.125 and representing a 16% improvement over the Transolver baseline, which yields an error of 0.075. These performance gains are further amplified on the DrivAerML dataset, where RETO achieves relative L2L_2 errors of 0.089 for surface pressure and 0.097 for velocity. In comparison, Transolver results in errors of 0.116 and 0.121 for the same metrics, indicating that RETO achieves precision enhancements of 23% and 19%, respectively. For comprehensive comparison, the surface pressure and velocity errors for AB-UBT are 0.102 and 0.124, while RegDGCNN yields 0.235 and 0.312, respectively. Information-theoretical analysis shows that the entropy peak of RETO at 0.35 is significantly lower than that of Transolver at 0.75 under 10410^4 resolution, indicating a focused attentional mechanism capable of preserving localized gradients against global diffusion.
Apr 28, 2026

Learning Neural Operator Surrogates for the Black Hole Accretion Code

General-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GR-MHD) simulations are essential for studying black hole accretion, relativistic jets, and magnetic reconnection, yet their computational cost severely limits systematic parameter exploration. We investigate neural operator surrogates for two astrophysically relevant simulation scenarios produced by the Black Hole Accretion Code (BHAC). First, a Physics Informed Fourier Neural Operator (PINO) is trained on the special-relativistic resistive MHD (SRRMHD) evolution of the Orszag-Tang vortex over a range of resistivities spanning the Sweet-Parker and fast reconnection regimes. By embedding the governing equations as an additional loss term evaluated at finer temporal resolution than the available data supervision, the model learns dynamics at time steps where no simulation data is provided, enabling recovery of plasmoid formation that a data-only baseline trained on the same sparse snapshots fails to reproduce. To our knowledge, the present work is the first application of a physics informed neural operator to special relativistic resistive MHD, and the first to investigate the capability of such models to resolve plasmoid formation in SRRMHD. In a second line of investigation, an OFormer-style Transformer Neural Operator is trained on the evolution of spine-sheath relativistic jets created with BHAC, in special-relativistic MHD (SRMHD). The model is directly applied on the adaptive mesh, highlighting the need for linear attention due to long sequences. The neural surrogate model is capable of capturing most of the major details, especially in early predictions. To our knowledge, this constitutes the first application of a neural operator directly on a high resolution adaptive mesh refinement grid in the context of MHD simulations.
Apr 27, 2026

Multi-scale Dynamic Wake Modeling and Prediction of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines via Physics-Informed Neural Networks and Fourier Neural Operators

Multi-scale dynamic wake modeling and prediction are essential for the real-time control and optimization of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs). In this study, wakes of FOWTs under coupled surge and pitch motions across a range of Strouhal numbers (St), which can induce wake meandering, are modeled via two novel deep-learning frameworks: physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and Fourier neural operators (FNOs). The high-fidelity dataset is obtained from large-eddy simulations with the actuator line model (LES-AL). The results demonstrate that the dominant large-scale dynamic structures, such as meandering, can be well modeled by both frameworks; however, FNOs exhibit significant advantages over the PINN model in terms of efficiency (8-fold computational speedup and 40-fold faster convergence), long-term predictive capability, and multi-scale coherent structural fidelity. Furthermore, the wakes predicted by the PINN model exhibit a smoothing effect that limits the resolution of high-frequency coherent structures and underestimates turbulent fluctuations in both the wake center and half-width. Spectral analysis reveals that FNOs resolve the primary meandering frequency (where Stp denotes the frequency induced by the coupled surge and pitch motions), its corresponding higher-order harmonics (2Stp, 3Stp), and the energy cascade. In contrast, the energy cascade in the PINN predictions dissipates more rapidly in the high-frequency regime (St > 1.0). Additionally, the pre-multiplied power spectral density indicates that the energy contained in meandering and the corresponding harmonic frequencies modeled by PINNs is relatively low compared to that in CFD and FNOs. These findings suggest that FNOs are promising for the high-fidelity, real-time modeling of FOWT wakes.
Apr 26, 2026

Deep Learning of Solver-Aware Turbulence Closures from Nudged LES Dynamics

The differentiable physics paradigm may be leveraged as an a-posteriori approach for discovering turbulence closure models by embedding a neural network parameterization directly inside the solver and optimizing it given potentially sparse target data. This addresses a key limitation of a-priori learning where direct numerical simulation (DNS) data is used to approximate the subgrid stress with the assumption of a low-pass filter. Closures trained in this a-priori manner frequently lead to unstable deployments due to the mismatch between the assumed filter and the effect of numerical discretizations and coarse-graining. In comparison, while typically stable during deployment, a-posteriori learning incurs high computational costs due to the need to backpropagate through a large eddy simulation (LES) solver. Furthermore, a-posteriori methods are challenging to apply broadly since they require significant modification of existing solvers. Finally, both approaches are limited when generalization is desired across different numerical schemes with their implicit filtering characteristics. In this work, we present a deep-learning approach for turbulence closure modeling built on the continuous data assimilation framework. Our approach enables the a-priori training of closures using sparsely observed DNS data without modifying or differentiating through the LES solver, while preserving stability during deployment for the recovery of invariant statistics. We focus on the model's ability to adapt to different discretizations by explicitly conditioning it on the numerical scheme. We use two- and three-dimensional canonical cases to test our framework and show that the learned correction systematically tracks the discretization error of the coarse solver.
Apr 25, 2026

Physics-Informed Temporal U-Net for High-Fidelity Fluid Interpolation

Reconstructing high-fidelity fluid dynamics from sparse temporal observations is quite challenging, mainly due to the chaotic and non-linear nature of fluid transport. Standard deep learning-based interpolation methods often tend to regress to the mean, which results in spatial blurring and temporal strobing, especially noticeable around the observed anchor frames where transitions become discontinuous. In this work, we propose a novel Temporal U-Net architecture that integrates a VGG-based perceptual loss along with a Physics-Informed Bridge to overcome these issues. By introducing time-weighted feature blending and enforcing a parabolic boundary condition defined by t(1 - t), the model ensures smooth transitions while also maintaining perfect consistency at the endpoints. Experimental results on multi-channel RGB fluid data show that our method clearly outperforms standard models, both in terms of structural fidelity and texture preservation. In particular, the model achieves a Mean Absolute Error of 0.015, compared to 0.085 for a standard L1 baseline. Further Spatial Power Spectral Density (PSD) analysis reveals that the model is able to retain high-frequency turbulent details that are usually lost in deterministic reconstructions.
Apr 25, 2026

GeoFunFlow-3D: A Physics-Guided Generative Flow Matching Framework for High-Fidelity 3D Aerodynamic Inference over Complex Geometries

Deep generative models and neural operators have demonstrated significant potential for 3D aerodynamic inference. However, they often face inherent challenges in maintaining physical consistency and preserving high-frequency features, primarily due to spectral bias and gradient conflicts within the governing equations. To address these issues, we propose GeoFunFlow-3D, a physics-guided generative flow matching framework. Temporally, we utilize optimal transport theory to build the generation path, ensuring stable training dynamics. Spectrally, we introduce a high-order discrete engine without automatic differentiation (No-AD) to reduce gradient stiffness. Spatially, a topology-aware super-resolution module (SATO) is employed to rigorously enforce physical laws in localized regions such as shock waves. We evaluated our framework on complex industrial datasets. On the BlendedNet dataset, the model successfully avoids mode collapse even under sparse data conditions. For the NASA Rotor37 test, it accurately captures 3D detached shock structures. Compared to conventional operators, GeoFunFlow-3D significantly improves accuracy, reducing the pressure field error (RRMSE) to 0.0215 while maintaining competitive inference efficiency. Ultimately, this work provides a reliable, geometry-driven approach for generating high-dimensional fluid fields.
Apr 24, 2026

Collocation-based Robust Physics Informed Neural Networks for time-dependent simulations of pollution propagation under thermal inversion conditions on Spitsbergen

In this paper, we propose a Physics-Informed Neural Network framework for time-dependent simulations of pollution propagation originating from moving emission sources. We formulate a robust variational framework for the time-dependent advection-diffusion problem and establish the boundedness and inf-sup stability of the corresponding discrete weak formulation. Based on this mathematical foundation, we construct a robust loss function that is directly related to the true approximation error, defined as the difference between the neural network approximation and the (unknown) exact solution. Additionally, a collocation-based strategy is introduced to speed up neural network training. As a case study, we investigate pollution propagation caused by snowmobile traffic in Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen, supported by detailed in-field measurements collected using dedicated sensors. The proposed framework is applied to analyze the effects of thermal inversion on pollutant accumulation. Our results demonstrate that thermal inversion traps dense and humid air masses near the ground, significantly enhancing particulate matter (PM) concentration and worsening local air quality.
Apr 22, 2026

Droplet-LNO: Physics-Informed Laplace Neural Operators for Accurate Prediction of Droplet Spreading Dynamics on Complex Surfaces

Spreading of liquid droplets on solid substrates constitutes a classic multiphysics problem with widespread applications ranging from inkjet printing, spray cooling, to biomedical microfluidic systems. Yet, accurate computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations are prohibitively expensive, taking more than 18 to 24 hours for each transient computation. In this paper, Physics-Informed Laplace Operator Neural Network (PI-LNO) is introduced, representing a novel architecture where the Laplace integral transform function serves as a learned physics-informed functional basis. Extensive comparative benchmark studies were performed against five other state-of-the-art approaches: UNet, UNet with attention modules (UNet-AM), DeepONet, Physics-Informed UNet (PI-UNet), and Laplace Neural Operator (LNO). Through complex Laplace transforms, PI-LNO natively models the exponential transient dynamics of the spreading process. A TensorFlow-based PI-LNO is trained on multi-surface CFD data spanning contact angles θsε[20,160]θ_s ε[20,160], employing a physics-regularized composite loss combining data fidelity (MSE, MAE, RMSE) with Navier-Stokes, Cahn-Hilliard, and causality constraints.
Apr 22, 2026

CO2_2 sequestration hybrid solver using isogeometric alternating-directions and collocation-based robust variational physics informed neural networks (IGA-ADS-CRVPINN)

This paper presents the hybrid solver for a CO2CO_2 sequestration problem. The solver uses the IGA-ADS (IsoGeometric Analysis Alternating Directions solver) to compute the saturation scalar field update using the explicit method, and CRVPINN (Collocation-based Robust Variational Physics Informed Neural Networks solver) to compute the pressure scalar field. The study focuses on simulating the physical behavior of CO2CO_2 in porous structures, excluding chemical reactions. The mathematical model is based on Darcy's Law. The CRVPINN is pretrained on the initial pressure configuration, and the time step pressure updates require only 100 iterations of the Adam method per time step. We compare our hybrid IGA-ADS solver, coupled with the CRVPINN method, with a baseline of the IGA-ADS solver coupled with the MUMPS direct solver. Our hybrid solver is over 3 times faster on a single computational node from the ARES cluster of ACK CYFRONET. Future work includes extensive testing, inverse problem solving, and potential application to H2H_2 storage problems.
Apr 22, 2026

AI models of unstable flow exhibit hallucination

We report the first systematic evidence of hallucination in AI models of fluid dynamics, demonstrated in the canonical problem of hydrodynamically unstable transport known as viscous fingering. AI-based modeling of flow with instabilities remains challenging because rapidly evolving, multiscale fingering patterns are difficult to resolve accurately. We identify solutions that appear visually realistic yet are physically implausible, analogous to hallucinations in large language models. These hallucinations manifest as spurious fluid interfaces and reverse diffusion that violate conservation laws. We show that their origin lies in the spectral bias of AI models, which becomes dominant at high flow rates and viscosity contrasts. Guided by this insight, we introduce DeepFingers, a new framework for AI-driven fluid dynamics that enforces balanced learning across the full spectrum of spatial modes by combining the Fourier Neural Operator with a Deep Operator Network to predict the spatiotemporal evolution of viscous fingers. By conditioning on both time and viscosity contrast, DeepFingers learns mappings between successive concentration fields across regimes. The framework accurately captures tip splitting, finger merging, and channel formation while preserving global metrics of mixing. The results open a new research direction to investigate fundamental limitations in AI models of physical systems.
Apr 21, 2026

FlowForge: A Staged Local Rollout Engine for Flow-Field Prediction

Deep learning surrogates for CFD flow-field prediction often rely on large, complex models, which can be slow and fragile when data are noisy or incomplete. We introduce FlowForge, a staged local rollout engine that predicts future flow fields by compiling a locality-preserving update schedule and executing it with a shared lightweight local predictor. Rather than producing the next frame in a single global pass, FlowForge rewrites spatial sites stage by stage so that each update conditions only on bounded local context exposed by earlier stages. This compile-execute design aligns inference with short-range physical dependence, keeps latency predictable, and limits error amplification from global mixing. Across PDEBench, CFDBench, and BubbleML, FlowForge matches or improves upon strong baselines in pointwise accuracy, delivers consistently better robustness to noise and missing observations, and maintains stable multi-step rollout behavior while reducing per-step latency.
Apr 20, 2026

Faster by Design: Interactive Aerodynamics via Neural Surrogates Trained on Expert-Validated CFD

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is central to race-car aerodynamic development, yet its cost -- tens of thousands of core-hours per high-fidelity evaluation -- severely limits the design space exploration feasible within realistic budgets. AI-based surrogate models promise to alleviate this bottleneck, but progress has been constrained by the limited complexity of public datasets, which are dominated by smoothed passenger-car shapes that fail to exercise surrogates on the thin, complex, highly loaded components governing motorsport performance. This work presents three primary contributions. First, we introduce a high-fidelity RANS dataset built on a parametric LMP2-class CAD model and spanning six operating conditions (map points) covering straight-line and cornering regimes, generated and validated by aerodynamics experts at Dallara to preserve features relevant to industrial motorsport. Second, we present the Gauge-Invariant Spectral Transformer (GIST), a graph-based neural operator whose spectral embeddings encode mesh connectivity to enhance predictions on tightly packed, complex geometries. GIST guarantees discretization invariance and scales linearly with mesh size, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy on both public benchmarks and the proposed race-car dataset. Third, we demonstrate that GIST achieves a level of predictive accuracy suitable for early-stage aerodynamic design, providing a first validation of the concept of interactive design-space exploration -- where engineers query a surrogate in place of the CFD solver -- within industrial motorsport workflows.
Apr 20, 2026

Towards a Foundation-Model Paradigm for Aerodynamic Prediction in Three-dimensional Design

Accurate machine-learning models for aerodynamic prediction are essential for accelerating shape optimization, yet remain challenging to develop for complex three-dimensional configurations due to the high cost of generating training data. This work introduces a methodology for efficiently constructing accurate surrogate models for design purposes by first pre-training a large-scale model on diverse geometries and then fine-tuning it with a few more detailed task-specific samples. A Transformer-based architecture, AeroTransformer, is developed and tailored for large-scale training to learn aerodynamics. The methodology is evaluated on transonic wings, where the model is pre-trained on SuperWing, a dataset of nearly 30000 samples with broad geometric diversity, and subsequently fine-tuned to handle specific wing shapes perturbed from the Common Research Model. Results show that, with 450 task-specific samples, the proposed methodology achieves 0.36% error on surface-flow prediction, reducing 84.2% compared to training from scratch. The influence of model configurations and training strategies is also systematically studied to provide guidance on effectively training and deploying such models under limited data and computational budgets. To facilitate reuse, we release the datasets and the pre-trained models at https://github.com/tum-pbs/AeroTransformer. An interactive design tool is also built on the pre-trained model and is available online at https://webwing.pbs.cit.tum.de.
Apr 20, 2026

TPS-CalcBench: A Benchmark and Diagnostic Evaluation Framework for LLM Analytical Calculation Competence in Hypersonic Thermal Protection System Engineering

Deploying LLMs as reasoning assistants in safety-critical aerospace engineering requires stricter evaluation criteria than general scientific benchmarks. In hypersonic thermal protection system (TPS) design, inaccurate stagnation-point heat flux or boundary-layer calculations may cause catastrophic design margin violations. Models with numerically reasonable but physically invalid answers are more dangerous than those declining to respond. Current scientific benchmarks only test abstract math and basic physics, evaluate final answers solely, ignore engineering reasoning processes, and cannot detect such critical failures. We propose TPS-CalcBench, the first diagnostic benchmark for closed-form analytical calculations in hypersonic aerodynamics and high-temperature gas dynamics that experienced TPS engineers conduct without simulations. Our contributions include domain-oriented task taxonomy with 4 difficulty levels and 8 categories from Anderson's textbook, dual-track evaluation measuring result accuracy and reasoning quality via an 8-dimension rubric and calibrated judge with human audit to identify right answer wrong reasoning issues, human-AI data pipeline producing 420 high-confidence core items and 810 noise-controlled pre-gating items from 4560 raw data, noise-sensitivity analysis measuring data quality impacts on model ranking, and three diagnostic intervention methods: DFA-TPS fine-tuning, RAG-EQ retrieval grounding and PA-CoT process-aware prompting. Tests on 13 models from 7 groups show wide performance differences (KPI 12.6-87.9), hidden formula selection defects, data-driven rank changes and effective intervention improvements, establishing a complete diagnose-evaluate-intervene framework for safety-critical engineering LLM deployment assessment.
Apr 18, 2026

Uncertainty Quantification in PINNs for Turbulent Flows: Bayesian Inference and Repulsive Ensembles

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a promising framework for solving inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), including the reconstruction of turbulent flow fields from sparse data. However, most existing PINN formulations are deterministic and do not provide reliable quantification of epistemic uncertainty, which is critical for ill-posed problems such as data-driven Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) modeling. In this work, we develop and systematically evaluate a set of probabilistic extensions of PINNs for uncertainty quantification in turbulence modeling. The proposed framework combines (i) Bayesian PINNs with Hamiltonian Monte Carlo sampling and a tempered multi-component likelihood, (ii) Monte Carlo dropout, and (iii) repulsive deep ensembles that enforce diversity in function space. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of ensemble diversity and likelihood tempering in improving uncertainty calibration for PDE-constrained inverse problems. The methods are assessed on a hierarchy of test cases, including the Van der Pol oscillator and turbulent flow past a circular cylinder at Reynolds numbers Re=3,900 (direct numerical simulation data) and Re = 10,000 (experimental particle image velocimetry data). The results demonstrate that Bayesian PINNs provide the most consistent uncertainty estimates across all inferred quantities, while function-space repulsive ensembles offer a computationally efficient approximation with competitive accuracy for primary flow variables. These findings provide quantitative insight into the trade-offs between accuracy, computational cost, and uncertainty calibration in physics-informed learning, and offer practical guidance for uncertainty quantification in data-driven turbulence modeling.
Apr 18, 2026

FlowRefiner: Flow Matching-Based Iterative Refinement for 3D Turbulent Flow Simulation

Accurate autoregressive prediction of 3D turbulent flows remains challenging for neural PDE solvers, as small errors in fine-scale structures can accumulate rapidly over rollout. In this paper, we propose FlowRefiner, a flow matching-based iterative refinement framework for 3D turbulent flow simulation. The method replaces stochastic denoising refinement with deterministic ODE-based correction, uses a unified velocity-field regression objective across all refinement stages, and introduces a decoupled sigma schedule that fixes the noise range independently of refinement depth. These design choices yield stable and effective refinement in the small-noise regime. Experiments on large-scale 3D turbulence with rich multi-scale structures show that FlowRefiner achieves state-of-the-art autoregressive prediction accuracy and strong physical consistency. Although developed for turbulent flow simulation, the proposed framework is broadly applicable to iterative refinement problems in scientific modeling.
Apr 15, 2026

Non-intrusive Learning of Physics-Informed Spatio-temporal Surrogate for Accelerating Design

Most practical engineering design problems involve nonlinear spatio-temporal dynamical systems. Multi-physics simulations are often performed to capture the fine spatio-temporal scales which govern the evolution of these systems. However, these simulations are often high-fidelity in nature, and can be computationally very expensive. Hence, generating data from these expensive simulations becomes a bottleneck in an end-to-end engineering design process. Spatio-temporal surrogate modeling of these dynamical systems has been a popular data-driven solution to tackle this computational bottleneck. This is because accurate machine learning models emulating the dynamical systems can be orders of magnitude faster than the actual simulations. However, one key limitation of purely data-driven approaches is their lack of generalizability to inputs outside the training distribution. In this paper, we propose a physics-informed spatio-temporal surrogate modeling (PISTM) framework constrained by the physics of the underlying dynamical system. The framework leverages state-of-the-art advancements in the field of Koopman autoencoders to learn the underlying spatio-temporal dynamics in a non-intrusive manner, coupled with a spatio-temporal surrogate model which predicts the behavior of the Koopman operator in a specified time window for unknown operating conditions. We evaluate our framework on a prototypical fluid flow problem of interest: two-dimensional incompressible flow around a cylinder.
Apr 15, 2026

Nested Fourier-enhanced neural operator for efficient modeling of radiation transfer in fires

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has become an essential tool for predicting fire behavior, yet maintaining both efficiency and accuracy remains challenging. A major source of computational cost in fire simulations is the modeling of radiation transfer, which is usually the dominant heat transfer mechanism in fires. Solving the high-dimensional radiative transfer equation (RTE) with traditional numerical methods can be a performance bottleneck. Here, we present a machine learning framework based on Fourier-enhanced multiple-input neural operators (Fourier-MIONet) as an efficient alternative to direct numerical integration of the RTE. We first investigate the performance of neural operator architectures for a small-scale 2D pool fire and find that Fourier-MIONet provides the most accurate radiative solution predictions. The approach is then extended to 3D CFD fire simulations, where the computational mesh is locally refined across multiple levels. In these high-resolution settings, monolithic surrogate models for direct field-to-field mapping become difficult to train and computationally inefficient. To address this issue, a nested Fourier-MIONet is proposed to predict radiation solutions across multiple mesh-refinement levels. We validate the approach on 3D McCaffrey pool fires simulated with FireFOAM, including fixed fire sizes and a unified model trained over a continuous range of heat release rates (HRRs). The proposed method achieves global relative errors of 2-4% for 3D varying-HRR scenarios while providing faster inference than the estimated cost of one finite-volume radiation solve in FireFOAM for the 16-solid-angle case. With fast and accurate inference, the surrogate makes higher-fidelity radiation treatments practical and enables the incorporation of more spectrally resolved radiation models into CFD fire simulations for engineering applications.
Apr 15, 2026

Applying Two-Grid Preconditioner for Subsurface Flow Simulation using Attention-enhanced Hybrid Network to Accelerate Multiscale Discretization in High-contrast Media

In this paper, we study the efficient numerical solution of Darcy equations in strongly heterogeneous media with high-contrast permeability and propose a hybrid framework that combines learning with multiscale numerical methods. The learning component is used for the prediction of multiscale basis functions in the mixed generalized multiscale finite element method (mixed GMsFEM), with the goal of reducing the repeated local computations required in the offline stage. Once these basis functions are predicted, the global system is assembled and the pressure field is computed by a two-grid preconditioned solver. The resulting method accelerates the costly local basis-construction stage while retaining the multiscale discretization and preconditioned iterative structure of the underlying solver. Numerical experiments on two-dimensional heterogeneous Darcy problems show that the proposed framework yields more accurate final pressure reconstruction than several representative learning-based methods and remains stable under strong heterogeneity and high-contrast coefficients. In comparison with the traditional mixed GMsFEM, its main advantage lies in the efficiency of the basis-generation stage, while the quality of the global solve is still ensured by the two-grid preconditioner. These results indicate that accelerating multiscale basis construction through learning, while preserving a mature numerical solver for the global problem, provides a viable approach for high-resolution Darcy-type simulations.
Apr 15, 2026

Data-driven Learning of Probabilistic Model of Binary Droplet Collision for Spray Simulation

Binary droplet collisions are ubiquitous in dense sprays. Traditional deterministic models cannot adequately represent transitional and stochastic behaviors of binary droplet collision. To bridge this gap, we developed a probabilistic model by using a machine learning approach, the Light Gradient-Boosting Machine (LightGBM). The model was trained on a comprehensive dataset of 33,540 experimental cases covering eight collision regimes across broad ranges of Weber number, Ohnesorge number, impact parameter, size ratio, and ambient pressure. The resulting machine learning classifier captures highly nonlinear regime boundaries with 99.2% accuracy and retains sensitivity in transitional regions. To facilitate its implementation in spray simulation, the model was translated into a probabilistic form, a multinomial logistic regression, which preserves 93.2% accuracy and maps continuous inter-regime transitions. A biased-dice sampling mechanism then converts these probabilities into definite yet stochastic outcomes. This work presents the first probabilistic, high-dimensional droplet collision model derived from experimental data, offering a physically consistent, comprehensive, and user-friendly solution for spray simulation.
Apr 15, 2026

AeTHERON: Autoregressive Topology-aware Heterogeneous Graph Operator Network for Fluid-Structure Interaction

Surrogate modeling of body-driven fluid flows where immersed moving boundaries couple structural dynamics to chaotic, unsteady fluid phenomena remains a fundamental challenge for both computational physics and machine learning. We present AeTHERON, a heterogeneous graph neural operator whose architecture directly mirrors the structure of the sharp-interface immersed boundary method (IBM): a dual-graph representation separating fluid and structural domains, coupled through sparse cross-attention that reflects the compact support of IBM interpolation stencils. This physics-informed inductive bias enables AeTHERON to learn nonlinear fluid-structure coupling in a shared high-dimensional latent space, with continuous sinusoidal time embeddings providing temporal generalization across lead times. We evaluate AeTHERON on direct numerical simulations of a flapping flexible caudal fin, a canonical FSI benchmark featuring leading-edge vortex formation, large membrane deformation, and chaotic wake shedding across a 4x5 parameter grid of membrane thickness (h* = 0.01-0.04) and Strouhal number (St = 0.30-0.50). As a proof-of-concept, we train on the first 150 timesteps of a representative case using a 70/30 train/validation split and evaluate on the fully unseen extrapolation window t=150-200. AeTHERON captures large-scale vortex topology and wake structure with qualitative fidelity, achieving a mean extrapolation MAE of 0.168 without retraining, with error peaking near flapping half-cycle transitions where flow reorganization is most rapid -- a physically interpretable pattern consistent with the nonlinear fluid-membrane coupling. Inference requires milliseconds per timestep on a single GPU versus hours for equivalent DNS computation. This is a continuously developing preprint; results and figures will be updated in subsequent versions.
Apr 13, 2026

AutoSurrogate: An LLM-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Autonomous Construction of Deep Learning Surrogate Models in Subsurface Flow

High-fidelity numerical simulation of subsurface flow is computationally intensive, especially for many-query tasks such as uncertainty quantification and data assimilation. Deep learning (DL) surrogates can significantly accelerate forward simulations, yet constructing them requires substantial machine learning (ML) expertise - from architecture design to hyperparameter tuning - that most domain scientists do not possess. Furthermore, the process is predominantly manual and relies heavily on heuristic choices. This expertise gap remains a key barrier to the broader adoption of DL surrogate techniques. For this reason, we present AutoSurrogate, a large-language-model-driven multi-agent framework that enables practitioners without ML expertise to build high-quality surrogates for subsurface flow problems through natural-language instructions. Given simulation data and optional preferences, four specialized agents collaboratively execute data profiling, architecture selection from a model zoo, Bayesian hyperparameter optimization, model training, and quality assessment against user-specified thresholds. The system also handles common failure modes autonomously, including restarting training with adjusted configurations when numerical instabilities occur and switching to alternative architectures when predictive accuracy falls short of targets. In our setting, a single natural-language sentence can be sufficient to produce a deployment-ready surrogate model, with minimum human intervention required at any intermediate stage. We demonstrate the utility of AutoSurrogate on a 3D geological carbon storage modeling task, mapping permeability fields to pressure and CO2_2 saturation fields over 31 timesteps. Without any manual tuning, AutoSurrogate is able to outperform expert-designed baselines and domain-agnostic AutoML methods, demonstrating strong potential for practical deployment.
Apr 13, 2026

One Scale at a Time: Scale-Autoregressive Modeling for Fluid Flow Distributions

Analyzing unsteady fluid flows often requires access to the full distribution of possible temporal states, yet conventional PDE solvers are computationally prohibitive and learned time-stepping surrogates quickly accumulate error over long rollouts. Generative models avoid compounding error by sampling states independently, but diffusion and flow-matching methods, while accurate, are limited by the cost of many evaluations over the entire mesh. We introduce scale-autoregressive modeling (SAR) for sampling flows on unstructured meshes hierarchically from coarse to fine: it first generates a low-resolution field, then refines it by progressively sampling higher resolutions conditioned on coarser predictions. This coarse-to-fine factorization improves efficiency by concentrating computation at coarser scales, where uncertainty is greatest, while requiring fewer steps at finer scales. Across unsteady-flow benchmarks of varying complexity, SAR attains substantially lower distributional error and higher per-sample accuracy than state-of-the-art diffusion models based on multi-scale GNNs, while matching or surpassing a flow-matching Transolver (a linear-time transformer) yet running 2-7x faster than this depending on the task. Overall, SAR provides a practical tool for fast and accurate estimation of statistical flow quantities (e.g., turbulent kinetic energy and two-point correlations) in real-world settings.
Apr 13, 2026

Signal-Aware Conditional Diffusion Surrogates for Transonic Wing Pressure Prediction

Accurate and efficient surrogate models for aerodynamic surface pressure fields are essential for accelerating aircraft design and analysis, yet deterministic regressors trained with pointwise losses often smooth sharp nonlinear features. This work presents a conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic model for predicting surface pressure distributions on the NASA Common Research Model wing under varying conditions of Mach number, angle of attack, and four control surface deflections. The framework operates on unstructured surface data through a principal component representation used as a non-truncated, reversible linear reparameterization of the pressure field, enabling a fully connected architecture. A signal-aware training objective is derived by propagating a reconstruction loss through the diffusion process, yielding a timestep-dependent weighting that improves fidelity in regions with strong pressure gradients. The stochastic sampling process is analyzed through repeated conditional generations, and two diagnostic metrics are introduced, the Local Reliability Index and Global Reliability Index, to relate sampling-induced spread to reconstruction error. Relative to the considered deterministic baselines, the proposed formulation reduces mean absolute error and improves the reconstruction of suction peaks, shock structures, and control surface discontinuities. The sampling-induced spread exhibits strong correspondence with surrogate error, supporting its interpretation as a qualitative reliability indicator rather than calibrated uncertainty quantification.
Apr 10, 2026

Physics-guided surrogate learning enables zero-shot control of turbulent wings

Turbulent boundary layers over aerodynamic surfaces are a major source of aircraft drag, yet their control remains challenging due to multiscale dynamics and spatial variability, particularly under adverse pressure gradients. Reinforcement learning has outperformed state-of-the-art strategies in canonical flows, but its application to realistic geometries is limited by computational cost and transferability. Here we show that these limitations can be overcome by exploiting local structures of wall-bounded turbulence. Policies are trained in turbulent channel flows matched to wing boundary-layer statistics and deployed directly onto a NACA4412 wing section at Rec=2×105Re_c=2\times10^5 without additional training on the wing, constituting zero-shot deployment. The transferred policies reduce total drag by 11.1%, while state-of-the-art opposition control reduces it by 8.9%. With the actuation cost taken into account, the corresponding net-energy savings are 10.9% and 8.8%, respectively. Surrogate training provides an estimated improvement of four orders of magnitude in exploration efficiency over direct on-wing training, enabling scalable flow control.
Apr 9, 2026

Approximation of the Basset force in the Maxey-Riley-Gatignol equations via universal differential equations

The Maxey-Riley-Gatignol equations (MaRGE) model the motion of spherical inertial particles in a fluid. They contain the Basset force, an integral term which models history effects due to the formation of wakes and boundary layer effects. This causes the force that acts on a particle to depend on its past trajectory and complicates the numerical solution of MaRGE. Therefore, the Basset force is often neglected, despite substantial evidence that it has both quantitative and qualitative impact on the movement patterns of modelled particles. Using the concept of universal differential equations, we propose an approximation of the history term via neural networks which approximates MaRGE by a system of ordinary differential equations that can be solved with standard numerical solvers like Runge-Kutta methods.
Apr 9, 2026

Toward Generalizable Graph Learning for 3D Engineering AI: Explainable Workflows for CAE Mode Shape Classification and CFD Field Prediction

Automotive engineering development increasingly relies on heterogeneous 3D data, including finite element (FE) models, body-in-white (BiW) representations, CAD geometry, and CFD meshes. At the same time, engineering teams face growing pressure to shorten development cycles, improve performance and accelerate innovation. Although artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly explored in this domain, many current methods remain task-specific, difficult to interpret, and hard to reuse across development stages. This paper presents a practical graph learning framework for 3D engineering AI, in which heterogeneous engineering assets are converted into physics-aware graph representations and processed by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). The framework is designed to support both classification and prediction tasks. The framework is validated on two automotive applications: CAE vibration mode shape classification and CFD aerodynamic field prediction. For CAE vibration mode classification, a region-aware BiW graph supports explainable mode classification across vehicle and FE variants under label scarcity. For CFD aerodynamic field prediction, a physics-informed surrogate predicts pressure and wall shear stress (WSS) across aerodynamic body shape variants, while symmetry preserving down sampling retains accuracy with lower computational cost. The framework also outlines data generation guidance that can help engineers identify which additional simulations or labels are valuable to collect next. These results demonstrate a practical and reusable engineering AI workflow for more trustworthy CAE and CFD decision support.
Apr 8, 2026

A solver-in-the-loop framework for end-to-end differentiable coastal hydrodynamics

Numerical simulation of wave propagation and run-up is a cornerstone of coastal engineering and tsunami hazard assessment. However, applying these forward models to inverse problems, such as bathymetry estimation, source inversion, and structural optimization, remains notoriously difficult due to the rigidity and high computational cost of deriving discrete adjoints. In this paper, we introduce AegirJAX, a fully differentiable hydrodynamic solver based on the depth-integrated, non-hydrostatic shallow-water equations. By implementing the solver entirely within a reverse-mode automatic differentiation framework, AegirJAX treats the time-marching physics loop as a continuous computational graph. We demonstrate the framework's versatility across a suite of scientific machine learning tasks: (1) discovering regime-specific neural corrections for model misspecifications in highly dispersive wave propagation; (2) performing continuous topology optimization for breakwater design; (3) training recurrent neural networks in-the-loop for active wave cancellation; and (4) inverting hidden bathymetry and submarine landslide kinematics directly from downstream sensor data. The proposed differentiable paradigm fundamentally blurs the line between forward simulation and inverse optimization, offering a unified, end-to-end framework for coastal hydrodynamics.
Apr 7, 2026

Calibration of a neural network ocean closure for improved mean state and variability

Global ocean models exhibit biases in the mean state and variability, particularly at coarse resolution, where mesoscale eddies are unresolved. To address these biases, parameterization coefficients are typically tuned ad hoc. Here, we formulate parameter tuning as a calibration problem using Ensemble Kalman Inversion (EKI). We optimize parameters of a neural network parameterization of mesoscale eddies in two idealized ocean models at coarse resolution. The calibrated parameterization reduces errors by factors of 1.7-3.3 in the time-averaged fluid interfaces and their variability compared to the unparameterized model, depending on the metric and configuration. The EKI method is robust to noise in time-averaged statistics arising from chaotic ocean dynamics. Furthermore, we propose an efficient calibration protocol that bypasses integration to statistical equilibrium by carefully choosing an initial condition. These results demonstrate that systematic calibration can substantially improve coarse-resolution ocean simulations and provide a practical pathway for reducing biases in global ocean models.