Irregular Domain Boundaries Research Articles

Neural PDE Solvers for Irregular Domains

Neural network-based approaches for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) have recently received special attention. However, most neural PDE solvers only apply to rectilinear domains and do not systematically address the imposition of boundary conditions over irregular domain boundaries. In this paper, we present a neural framework to solve partial differential equations over domains with irregularly shaped (non-rectilinear) geometric boundaries. Given the shape of the domain as an input (represented as a binary mask), our network is able to predict the solution field, and can generalize to novel (unseen) irregular domains; the key technical ingredient to realizing this model is a physics-informed loss function that directly incorporates the interior-exterior information of the geometry. We also perform a careful error analysis which reveals theoretical insights into several sources of error incurred in the model-building process. Finally, we showcase various applications in 2D and 3D, along with favorable comparisons with ground truth solutions.

Gradient-based wind farm layout optimization with inclusion and exclusion zones

Abstract. Wind farm layout optimization is usually subjected to boundary constraints of irregular shapes. The analytical expressions of these shapes are rarely available, and, consequently, it can be challenging to include them in the mathematical formulation of the problem. This paper presents a new methodology to integrate multiple disconnected and irregular domain boundaries in wind farm layout optimization problems. The method relies on the analytical gradients of the distances between wind turbine locations and boundaries, which are represented by polygons. This parameterized representation of boundary locations allows for a continuous optimization formulation. A limitation of the method, if combined with gradient-based solvers, is that wind turbines are placed within the nearest polygons when the optimization is started in order to satisfy the boundary constraints; thus the allocation of wind turbines per polygon is highly dependent on the initial guess. To overcome this and improve the quality of the solutions, two independent strategies are proposed. A case study is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the method and the proposed strategies. In this study, a wind farm layout is optimized in order to maximize the annual energy production (AEP) in a non-uniform wind resource site. The problem is constrained by the minimum distance between wind turbines and five irregular polygon boundaries, defined as inclusion zones. Initial guesses are used to instantiate the optimization problem, which is solved following three independent approaches: (1) a baseline approach that uses a gradient-based solver; (2) approach 1 combined with the relaxation of the boundaries, which allows for a better design space exploration; and (3) the application of a heuristic algorithm, “smart-start”, prior to the gradient-based optimization, improving the allocation of wind turbines within the inclusion polygons based on the potential wind resource and the available area. The results show that the relaxation of boundaries combined with a gradient-based solver achieves on average +10.2 % of AEP over the baseline, whilst the smart-start algorithm, combined with a gradient-based solver, finds on average +20.5 % of AEP with respect to the baseline and +9.4 % of AEP with respect to the relaxation strategy.

Geometric multigrid method for solving Poisson's equation on octree grids with irregular boundaries

A method is presented to include irregular domain boundaries in a geometric multigrid solver. Dirichlet boundary conditions can be imposed on an irregular boundary defined by a level set function. Our implementation employs quadtree/octree grids with adaptive refinement, a cell-centered discretization and pointwise smoothing. Boundary locations are determined at a subgrid resolution by performing line searches. For grid blocks near the interface, custom operator stencils are stored that take the interface into account. For grid block away from boundaries, a standard second-order accurate discretization is used. The convergence properties, robustness and computational cost of the method are illustrated with several test cases. New version program summaryProgram Title: AfivoCPC Library link to program files:https://doi.org/10.17632/5y43rjdmxd.2Developer's repository link:https://github.com/MD-CWI/afivoLicensing provisions: GPLv3Programming language: FortranJournal reference of previous version: Comput. Phys. Commun. 233 (2018) 156–166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpc.2018.06.018Does the new version supersede the previous version?: Yes.Reasons for the new version: Add support for internal boundaries in the geometric multigrid solver.Summary of revisions: The geometric multigrid solver was generalized in several ways: a coarse grid solver from the Hypre library is used, operator stencils are now stored per grid block, and methods for including boundaries via a level set function were added.Nature of problem: The goal is to solve Poisson's equation in the presence of irregular boundaries that are not aligned with the computational grid. It is assumed these irregular boundaries are defined by a level set function, and that a Dirichlet type boundary condition is applied. The main applications are 2D and 3D simulations with octree-based adaptive mesh refinement, in which the mesh frequently changes but the irregular boundaries do not.Solution method: A geometric multigrid method compatible with octree grids is developed, using a cell-centered discretization and point-wise smoothing. Near irregular boundaries, custom operator stencils are stored. Line searches are performed to locate interfaces with sub-grid resolution. To increase the methods robustness, this line search is modified on coarse grids if boundaries are otherwise not resolved. The multigrid solver uses OpenMP parallelization.

An efficient method for modeling terrain and complex terrain boundaries in constrained wind farm layout optimization

A novel and efficient approach for modeling irregular domain boundaries and enforcing complex land-based constraints in wind farm layout optimization is presented. The presented method can be used to enforce constraints and represent complex domains for which an analytical expression is not available. The developed approach uses support vector domain description to obtain an analytical expression of the domain from data points sampled from the various regions for wind turbine placements. Such an analytical, continuous, differentiable description can then be used for wind farm layout optimization using gradient based and non-gradient based optimization algorithms. The applicability of the method was demonstrated on a wind farm layout optimization problem where several regions of the terrain were restricted. The method was shown to accurately and efficiently model regular, irregular, convex, non-convex and discontinuous domains/regions using only scattered data sampled from the domains. An efficient method for terrain modeling and interpolation is also presented. The proposed interpolation method uses quadtree decomposition to decompose the large interpolation problem into several smaller interpolation problems thereby reducing the complexity of the interpolation. The framework developed (libSVDD) is also made publicly available.

Bending of Nonconforming Thin Plates Based on the Mixed‐Order Manifold Method with Background Cells for Integration

As it is very difficult to construct conforming plate elements and the solutions achieved with conforming elements yield inferior accuracy to those achieved with nonconforming elements on many occasions, nonconforming elements, especially Adini’s element (ACM element), are often recommended for practical usage. However, the convergence, good numerical accuracy, and high computing efficiency of ACM element with irregular physical boundaries cannot be achieved using either the finite element method (FEM) or the numerical manifold method (NMM). The mixed‐order NMM with background cells for integration was developed to analyze the bending of nonconforming thin plates with irregular physical boundaries. Regular meshes were selected to improve the convergence performance; background cells were used to improve the integration accuracy without increasing the degrees of freedom, retaining the efficiency as well; the mixed‐order local displacement function was taken to improve the interpolation accuracy. With the penalized formulation fitted to the NMM for Kirchhoff’s thin plate bending, a new scheme was proposed to deal with irregular domain boundaries. Based on the present computational framework, comparisons with other studies were performed by taking several typical examples. The results indicated that the solutions achieved with the proposed NMM rapidly converged to the analytical solutions and their accuracy was vastly superior to that achieved with the FEM and the traditional NMM.

Self-consistent field theory simulations of polymers on arbitrary domains

We introduce a framework for simulating the mesoscale self-assembly of block copolymers in arbitrary confined geometries subject to Neumann boundary conditions. We employ a hybrid finite difference/volume approach to discretize the mean-field equations on an irregular domain represented implicitly by a level-set function. The numerical treatment of the Neumann boundary conditions is sharp, i.e. it avoids an artificial smearing in the irregular domain boundary. This strategy enables the study of self-assembly in confined domains and enables the computation of physically meaningful quantities at the domain interface. In addition, we employ adaptive grids encoded with Quad-/Oc-trees in parallel to automatically refine the grid where the statistical fields vary rapidly as well as at the boundary of the confined domain. This approach results in a significant reduction in the number of degrees of freedom and makes the simulations in arbitrary domains using effective boundary conditions computationally efficient in terms of both speed and memory requirement. Finally, in the case of regular periodic domains, where pseudo-spectral approaches are superior to finite differences in terms of CPU time and accuracy, we use the adaptive strategy to store chain propagators, reducing the memory footprint without loss of accuracy in computed physical observables.

High Resolution Sharp Computational Methods for Elliptic and Parabolic Problems in Complex Geometries

We present a review of some of the state-of-the-art numerical methods for solving the Stefan problem and the Poisson and the diffusion equations on irregular domains using (i) the level-set method for representing the (possibly moving) irregular domain's boundary, (ii) the ghost-fluid method for imposing the Dirichlet boundary condition at the irregular domain's boundary and (iii) a quadtree/octree node-based adaptive mesh refinement for capturing small length scales while significantly reducing the memory and CPU footprint. In addition, we highlight common misconceptions and describe how to properly implement these methods. Numerical experiments illustrate quantitative and qualitative results.

A simple multigrid scheme for solving the Poisson equation with arbitrary domain boundaries

We present a new multigrid scheme for solving the Poisson equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions on a Cartesian grid with irregular domain boundaries. This scheme was developed in the context of the Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) schemes based on a graded-octree data structure. The Poisson equation is solved on a level-by-level basis, using a “one-way interface” scheme in which boundary conditions are interpolated from the previous coarser level solution. Such a scheme is particularly well suited for self-gravitating astrophysical flows requiring an adaptive time stepping strategy. By constructing a multigrid hierarchy covering the active cells of each AMR level, we have designed a memory-efficient algorithm that can benefit fully from the multigrid acceleration. We present a simple method for capturing the boundary conditions across the multigrid hierarchy, based on a second-order accurate reconstruction of the boundaries of the multigrid levels. In case of very complex boundaries, small scale features become smaller than the discretization cell size of coarse multigrid levels and convergence problems arise. We propose a simple solution to address these issues. Using our scheme, the convergence rate usually depends on the grid size for complex grids, but good linear convergence is maintained. The proposed method was successfully implemented on distributed memory architectures in the RAMSES code, for which we present and discuss convergence and accuracy properties as well as timing performances.

Characterization and comparison of nanoscale domain boundary in congruent and stoichiometric LiTaO3 with scanning nonlinear dielectric microscopy

The domain boundary of congruent LiTaO3 (CLT) and stoichiometric LiTaO3 (SLT) were characterized on the nanoscale using scanning nonlinear dielectric microscopy. SLT exhibited a smooth domain boundary but CLT showed an irregular domain boundary. The nonlinear dielectric constant ε333 in the domain boundary of SLT changed abruptly from the domain but there was a gradual change in ε333 in the boundary of CLT. The linear dielectric constant in the domain boundary of SLT was slightly higher than that in the domain itself. In addition, the topography showed that only SLT had <1 nm dimensional deformation in the domain boundary.

Artificial Neural Network Method for Solution of Boundary Value Problems With Exact Satisfaction of Arbitrary Boundary Conditions

A method for solving boundary value problems (BVPs) is introduced using artificial neural networks (ANNs) for irregular domain boundaries with mixed Dirichlet/Neumann boundary conditions (BCs). The approximate ANN solution automatically satisfies BCs at all stages of training, including before training commences. This method is simpler than other ANN methods for solving BVPs due to its unconstrained nature and because automatic satisfaction of Dirichlet BCs provides a good starting approximate solution for significant portions of the domain. Automatic satisfaction of BCs is accomplished by the introduction of an innovative length factor. Several examples of BVP solution are presented for both linear and nonlinear differential equations in two and three dimensions. Error norms in the approximate solution on the order of 10(-4) to 10(-5) are reported for all example problems.

A least‐squares method for solving the mixed form of the groundwater flow equations

The mixed form of the areal groundwater flow equations is solved with a least-squares finite element procedure (LESFEM). Hydraulic head and x- and y-directed fluxes are state variables. Physical parameters and state variables are approximated using a bilinear basis. Grid refinements and irregular domain boundaries are implemented on rectangular meshes. Residuals are constructed at collocation points for conservation of mass and Darcy's law. Boundary condition residuals are constructed at discrete points along the boundary. The residuals are weighted, squared and summed. A set of algebraic equations is formed by taking the derivatives of the weighted sum of the squares of the residuals with respect to each unknown parameter in the approximation for the state variable and setting them to zero. Proper choice of a potential scaling parameter and residual weights is essential for the effective application of the algorithm. Test problem results demonstrate that the method is effective for both transient and steady state cases. The LESFEM algorithm generates a C°-continuous velocity field. The continuous velocity field and the rectangular mesh simplify the implementation of algorithms that require tracking. In addition, rectangular meshes simplify mesh and boundary generation.