Energy-based approaches provide a natural and physically consistent framework for a large class of partial differential equations arising in solid and fluid mechanics, where the governing equations follow from variational principles. In contrast to residual-based physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and their weak-form variants, which enforce the strong or weak form of the equations through loss minimization, the Deep Energy Method (DEM) directly computes the solution as the minimizer of an energy or incremental potential functional. This eliminates the need for residual weighting, avoids high-order derivatives, and enables the direct enforcement of physical constraints through the variational structure.In this work, we systematically revisit the Deep Energy Method, placing it in the broader context of physics-informed learning and variational modeling. We clarify the relationship between DEM, PINNs, and VPINNs, and identify the class of problems for which energy minimization provides intrinsic advantages in terms of stability, robustness and interpretability. Particular emphasis is placed on incremental variational formulations, which allow DEM to be applied to nonlinear, history-dependent and time-dependent problems, including phase-field fracture and dissipative systems. The variational structure underlying DEM further provides a natural foundation for optimization and inverse problems, where the energy functional acts as a physics-based constraint rather than a residual penalty. Through a series of numerical examples, we demonstrate that DEM offers a principled and effective alternative to residual-based methods for variational problems, highlighting its strengths and limitations relative to existing physics-informed approaches.
Pressure vessel analysis in the chemical, nuclear, and new-energy industries requires solving the same elasticity problem across many materials, geometries, and loads, where mesh quality and repeated solving govern both accuracy and cost. The finite element method (FEM) cannot amortise this repeated cost and fails on degenerate meshes, while the neural operators meant to replace it still need labelled data that FEM must generate. This paper proposes FEVessel, an adaptation of the Pretrained Finite Element Method (PFEM) to three-dimensional (3D) pressure vessels, and validates four capabilities across the two limitations above. FEVessel i) encodes each vessel as a point cloud with coordinate, material, and load channels, ii) pretrains a Transolver operator on the total potential energy instead of FEM labels, and iii) warm-starts iterative solvers with its prediction. A single model generalises across material, geometry, and boundary conditions at a $1.35\%$ relative displacement error, and its $2.07\%$ strain error is about $4.7$ times lower than that of a supervised Fourier neural operator ($9.72\%$), whose structured grid cannot preserve the through-thickness strain. Its warm start cuts algebraic multigrid iterations from $195$ to $18$, a $9.2\times$ end-to-end wall-clock speedup at the $10^{-3}$ engineering tolerance. The model transfers across mesh resolutions without retraining, holding about $3\%$ error at only $30\%$ of the training point density. On inverted and sliver meshes where FEM fails, the error remains below $3.66\%$. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of mesh-independent solution on industrially relevant 3D pressure vessels with degenerate meshes. Because training needs no labels, FEVessel works exactly where FEM cannot supply any, removing manual mesh repair from the analysis pipeline.
Yipin Sun, Yizheng Wang, Yuzhou Lin et al.· 0 citations
Plasolver, a physics-informed neural operator framework that combines the efficiency of operator learning with the accuracy and robustness of classical numerical solvers, provides an efficient, accurate, and discretization-invariant computational framework for nonlinear, path-dependent elastoplastic problems.
Yi-Zheng Wang, M. Eshaghi, Hua-Dong Zhang et al.· 0 citations
Numerical benchmarks show substantial accuracy of WINO together with total training times of about 15%-70% of those of supervised $\varphi$-FEM-FNO across all cases, without requiring reference-solution generation.
High-fidelity immersed-boundary simulation resolves the coupled motion of a deforming swimmer and its surrounding flow, but the resulting cost limits repeated evaluations for engineering design, parameter studies, and control. We develop neural-operator surrogates for temporal prediction of the hydrodynamic fields generated by planar and volumetric eel swimmers. The surrogates are trained on regular-grid fields exported from adaptive fluid--structure simulations and are conditioned on swimmer geometry and Reynolds number. The planar model jointly predicts two velocity components, scalar vorticity, and pressure. On five held-out high-Reynolds-number trajectories, its full-domain global relative L^2 error is 3.51 %. The volumetric formulation uses three target-specific models with a common multichannel input: one model predicts three-dimensional velocity, one predicts vorticity, and one predicts pressure. Their full-domain global relative L^2 errors on five held-out within-range trajectories are 3.44 %, 5.58 %, and 19.2 %. Together, the results demonstrate the feasibility of field-resolved neural surrogates for moving-boundary swimmer flows while identifying pressure accuracy and physical consistency as priorities for further development.
M. Eshaghi, Yizheng Wang, N. Valizadeh et al.· 0 citations
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