Hai-Sui Yu

Xiao-Xuan Chen, Pin Zhang, Hai-Sui Yu et al.

Cavity expansion is a canonical problem in geotechnics, which can be described by partial differential equations (PDEs) and ordinary differential equations (ODEs). This study explores the potential of using a new solver, a physics-informed neural network (PINN), to calculate the stress field in an expanded cavity in the elastic and elasto-plastic regimes. Whilst PINNs have emerged as an effective universal function approximator for deriving the solutions of a wide range of governing PDEs/ODEs, their ability to solve elasto-plastic problems remains uncertain. A novel parsimonious loss function is first proposed to balance the simplicity and accuracy of PINN. The proposed method is applied to diverse material behaviours in the cavity expansion problem including isotropic, anisotropic elastic media, and elastic-perfectly plastic media with Tresca and Mohr-Coulomb yield criteria. The results indicate that the use of a parsimonious prior information-based loss function is highly beneficial to deriving the approximate solutions of complex PDEs with high accuracy. The present method allows for accurate derivation of solutions for both elastic and plastic mechanical responses of an expanded cavity. It also provides insights into how PINNs can be further advanced to solve more complex problems in geotechnical practice.

He Yang, Fei Ren, Hai-Sui Yu et al.

Accuracy and efficiency of the conventional physics-informed neural network (PINN) need to be improved before it can be a competitive alternative for soil consolidation analyses. This paper aims to overcome these limitations by proposing a highly accurate and efficient physics-informed machine learning (PIML) approach, termed time-stepping physics-informed extreme learning machine (TS-PIELM). In the TS-PIELM framework the consolidation process is divided into numerous time intervals, which helps overcome the limitation of PIELM in solving differential equations with sharp gradients. To accelerate network training, the solution is approximated by a single-layer feedforward extreme learning machine (ELM), rather than using a fully connected neural network in PINN. The input layer weights of the ELM network are generated randomly and fixed during the training process. Subsequently, the output layer weights are directly computed by solving a system of linear equations, which significantly enhances the training efficiency compared to the time-consuming gradient descent method in PINN. Finally, the superior performance of TS-PIELM is demonstrated by solving three typical Terzaghi consolidation problems. Compared to PINN, results show that the computational efficiency and accuracy of the novel TS-PIELM framework are improved by more than 1000 times and 100 times for one-dimensional cases, respectively. This paper provides compelling evidence that PIML can be a powerful tool for computational geotechnics.

He Yang, Fei Ren, Francesco Calabro et al.

We are delighted to see the recent development of physics-informed extreme learning machine (PIELM) for its higher computational efficiency and accuracy compared to other physics-informed machine learning (PIML) paradigms. Since a comprehensive summary or review of PIELM is currently unavailable, we would like to take this opportunity to share our perspectives and experiences on this promising research direction. We can see that many efforts have been made to solve ordinary/partial differential equations (ODEs/PDEs) characterized by sharp gradients, nonlinearities, high-frequency behavior, hard constraints, uncertainty, multiphysics coupling, and interpretability. Despite these encouraging successes, many pressing challenges remain to be tackled, which also provides opportunities to develop more robust, interpretable, and generalizable PIELM frameworks for scientific and engineering applications.

Fei Ren, Sifan Wang, Pei-Zhi Zhuang et al.

Conventional physics-informed extreme learning machine (PIELM) often faces challenges in solving partial differential equations (PDEs) involving high-frequency and variable-frequency behaviors. To address these challenges, we propose a general Fourier feature physics-informed extreme learning machine (GFF-PIELM). We demonstrate that directly concatenating multiple Fourier feature mappings (FFMs) and an extreme learning machine (ELM) network makes it difficult to determine frequency-related hyperparameters. Fortunately, we find an alternative to establish the GFF-PIELM in three main steps. First, we integrate a variation of FFM into ELM as the Fourier-based activation function, so there is still one hidden layer in the GFF-PIELM framework. Second, we assign a set of frequency coefficients to the hidden neurons, which enables ELM network to capture diverse frequency components of target solutions. Finally, we develop an innovative, straightforward initialization method for these hyperparameters by monitoring the distribution of ELM output weights. GFF-PIELM not only retains the high accuracy, efficiency, and simplicity of the PIELM framework but also inherits the ability of FFMs to effectively handle high-frequency problems. We carry out five case studies with a total of ten numerical examples to highlight the feasibility and validity of the proposed GFF-PIELM, involving high frequency, variable frequency, multi-scale behaviour, irregular boundary and inverse problems. Compared to conventional PIELM, the GFF-PIELM approach significantly improves predictive accuracy without additional cost in training time and architecture complexity. Our results confirm that that PIELM can be extended to solve high-frequency and variable-frequency PDEs with high accuracy, and our initialization strategy may further inspire advances in other physics-informed machine learning (PIML) frameworks.