Adaptive Physics-Informed Neural Networks for the Blasius Boundary-Layer Problem

Abstract

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) provide a mesh-free approach for solving differential equations, but their performance can depend strongly on loss weighting, collocation placement, and optimization strategy. This study develops an adaptive PINN framework for the Blasius boundary-layer equation using gradient-norm-based adaptive loss weighting, nonuniform and residual-based collocation, and sequential Adam--L-BFGS optimization. In the representative run using the architecture $[1,100,100,1]$, the model predicts $f''(0)=0.3320762918$, compared with the high-accuracy benchmark $0.332057336215$, giving an absolute error of $1.896\times10^{-5}$. The final weighted loss is $6.789\times10^{-8}$, and the predicted stream-function, velocity, and shear profiles agree closely with an independent numerical boundary-value solution. A separate full-training architecture study shows that the two-hidden-layer model achieves the smallest wall-shear error among the four tested architectures, $1.629\times10^{-6}$, whereas the deepest network attains the smallest weighted objective but a substantially larger wall-shear error. Compared with the previously reported PINN value $f''(0)=0.33165$, the representative run reduces the wall-shear error by approximately a factor of $21.5$. The results show that the combined adaptive training framework can achieve high accuracy for the Blasius problem and that weighted loss alone is insufficient for identifying the most physically accurate PINN. Because the adaptive components are applied jointly, their individual contributions cannot be isolated from the present results and would require a controlled ablation study for separate assessment.