Hanfeng Zhai

Hanfeng Zhai, Hongtao Qiao, Hassan Mansour et al. · stanford

We present a scalable, data-driven simulation framework for large-scale heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems that couples physics-informed neural ordinary differential equations (PINODEs) with differential-algebraic equation (DAE) solvers. At the component level, we learn heat-exchanger dynamics using an implicit PINODE formulation that predicts conserved quantities (refrigerant mass $M_r$ and internal energy $E_\text{hx}$) as outputs, enabling physics-informed training via automatic differentiation of mass/energy balances. Stable long-horizon prediction is achieved through gradient-stabilized latent evolution with gated architectures and layer normalization. At the system level, we integrate learned components with DAE solvers (IDA and DASSL) that explicitly enforce junction constraints (pressure equilibrium and mass-flow consistency), and we use Bayesian optimization to tune solver parameters for accuracy--efficiency trade-offs. To reduce residual system-level bias, we introduce a lightweight corrector network trained on short trajectory segments. Across dual-compressor and scaled network studies, the proposed approach attains multi-fold speedups over high-fidelity simulation while keeping errors low (MAPE below a few percent) and scales to systems with up to 32 compressor--condenser pairs.

Hanfeng Zhai, Jingjie Yeo · stanford

Biofilms pose significant problems for engineers in diverse fields, such as marine science, bioenergy, and biomedicine, where effective biofilm control is a long-term goal. The adhesion and surface mechanics of biofilms play crucial roles in generating and removing biofilm. Designing customized nano-surfaces with different surface topologies can alter the adhesive properties to remove biofilms more easily and greatly improve long-term biofilm control. To rapidly design such topologies, we employ individual-based modeling and Bayesian optimization to automate the design process and generate different active surfaces for effective biofilm removal. Our framework successfully generated ideal nano-surfaces for biofilm removal through applied shear and vibration. Densely distributed short pillar topography is the optimal geometry to prevent biofilm formation. Under fluidic shearing, the optimal topography is to sparsely distribute tall, slim, pillar-like structures. When subjected to either vertical or lateral vibrations, thick trapezoidal cones are found to be optimal. Optimizing the vibrational loading indicates a small vibration magnitude with relatively low frequencies is more efficient in removing biofilm. Our results provide insights into various engineering fields that require surface-mediated biofilm control. Our framework can also be applied to more general materials design and optimization.

Hanfeng Zhai · stanford

Numerical modeling of polycrystal plasticity is computationally intensive. We employ Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to predict stresses on complex geometries for polycrystal plasticity from Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations. We present a novel message-passing GNN that encodes nodal strain and edge distances between FEM mesh cells, and aggregates to obtain embeddings and combines the decoded embeddings with the nodal strains to predict stress tensors on graph nodes. The GNN is trained on subgraphs generated from FEM mesh graphs, in which the mesh cells are converted to nodes and edges are created between adjacent cells. We apply the trained GNN to periodic polycrystals with complex geometries and learn the strain-stress maps based on crystal plasticity theory. The GNN is accurately trained on FEM graphs, in which the $R^2$ for both training and testing sets are larger than 0.99. The proposed GNN approach speeds up more than 150 times compared with FEM on stress predictions. We also apply the trained GNN to unseen simulations for validations and the GNN generalizes well with an overall $R^2$ of 0.992. The GNN accurately predicts the von Mises stress on polycrystals. The proposed model does not overfit and generalizes well beyond the training data, as the error distributions demonstrate. This work outlooks surrogating crystal plasticity simulations using graph data.

Hanfeng Zhai, Quan Zhou, Guohui Hu

Micro-bubbles and bubbly flows are widely observed and applied in chemical engineering, medicine, involves deformation, rupture, and collision of bubbles, phase mixture, etc. We study bubble dynamics by setting up two numerical simulation cases: bubbly flow with a single bubble and multiple bubbles, both confined in the microchannel, with parameters corresponding to their medical backgrounds. Both the cases have their medical background applications. Multiphase flow simulation requires high computation accuracy due to possible component losses that may be caused by sparse meshing during the computation. Hence, data-driven methods can be adopted as an useful tool. Based on physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), we propose a novel deep learning framework BubbleNet, which entails three main parts: deep neural networks (DNN) with sub nets for predicting different physics fields; the semi-physics-informed part, with only the fluid continuum condition and the pressure Poisson equation $\mathcal{P}$ encoded within; the time discretized normalizer (TDN), an algorithm to normalize field data per time step before training. We apply the traditional DNN and our BubbleNet to train the coarsened simulation data and predict the physics fields of both the two bubbly flow cases. The BubbleNets are trained for both with and without $\mathcal{P}$, from which we conclude that the 'physics-informed' part can serve as inner supervision. Results indicate our framework can predict the physics fields more accurately, estimating the prediction absolute errors. Our deep learning predictions outperform traditional numerical methods computed with similar data density meshing. The proposed network can potentially be applied to many other engineering fields.