Time Marching Neural Operator FE Coupling: AI Accelerated Physics Modeling

Abstract

Numerical solvers for PDEs often struggle to balance computational cost with accuracy, especially in multiscale and time-dependent systems. Neural operators offer a promising way to accelerate simulations, but their practical deployment is hindered by several challenges: they typically require large volumes of training data generated from high-fidelity solvers, tend to accumulate errors over time in dynamical settings, and often exhibit poor generalization in multiphysics scenarios. This work introduces a novel hybrid framework that integrates physics-informed deep operator network with FEM through domain decomposition and leverages numerical analysis for time marching. Our innovation lies in efficient coupling FE and DeepONet subdomains via a Schwarz method, expecting to solve complex and nonlinear regions by a pretrained DeepONet, while the remainder is handled by conventional FE. To address the challenges of dynamic systems, we embed a time stepping scheme directly into the DeepONet, substantially reducing long-term error propagation. Furthermore, an adaptive subdomain evolution strategy enables the ML-resolved region to expand dynamically, capturing fine-scale features without remeshing. Our framework shows accelerated convergence rates (up to 20% improvement in convergence rates compared to conventional FE coupling approaches) while preserving solution fidelity with error margins consistently below 3%. Our study shows that our proposed hybrid solver: (1) reduces computational costs by eliminating fine mesh requirements, (2) mitigates error accumulation in time-dependent simulations, and (3) enables automatic adaptation to evolving physical phenomena. This work establishes a new paradigm for coupling state of the art physics based and machine learning solvers in a unified framework, offering a robust, reliable, and scalable pathway for high fidelity multiscale simulations.