Phynet: Physics guided neural networks for particle drag force prediction in assembly

Abstract

Physics-based simulations are often used to model and understand complex physical systems in domains like fluid dynamics. Such simulations although used frequently, often suffer from inaccurate or incomplete representations either due to their high computational costs or due to lack of complete physical knowledge of the system. In such situations, it is useful to employ machine learning to fill the gap by learning a model of the complex physical process directly from simulation data. However, as data generation through simulations is costly, we need to develop models being cognizant of data paucity issues. In such scenarios it is helpful if the rich physical knowledge of the application domain is incorporated in the architectural design of machine learning models. We can also use information from physics-based simulations to guide the learning process using aggregate supervision to favorably constrain the learning process. In this paper, we propose PhyNet, a deep learning model using physics-guided structural priors and physics-guided aggregate supervision for modeling the drag forces acting on each particle in a Computational Fluid Dynamics-Discrete Element Method (CFD-DEM). We conduct extensive experiments in the context of drag force prediction and showcase the usefulness of including physics knowledge in our deep learning formulation. PhyNet has been compared to several state-of-the-art models and achieves a significant performance improvement of 8.46% on average . The source code has been made available* and the dataset used is detailed in [1, 2].