arXiv subjects

Icíar Alfaro

Publications and source records attributed to Icíar Alfaro.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Physics-informed, Generative Adversarial Design of Funicular Shells

Shell structures are pivotal in the fields of architecture and engineering, due to their aesthetic appeal and structural efficiency. Recently, 3D concrete printing has reignited the interest in these structures. But, as printed concrete cannot be reinforced with steel, structures built in this way must be designed to withstand primarily pure compression: they must be funicular shells. Nevertheless, a fundamental challenge remains unsolved since Robert Hooke's discovered the catenary arch in 1675: it is not known whether the concept of a funicular polygon can be generalised to three-dimensional structures. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have shown remarkable success in generating realistic data samples matching the distribution of the training data and have been shown to produce highly convincing synthetic images. This work proposes a physics-informed generative adversarial framework for the design of funicular shell structures. The approach employs a modified Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial architecture physically guided by an auxiliary discriminator to generate realistic and structurally efficient shell geometries. Specifically, the model is constrained by the membrane factor to penalize geometries dominated by bending. An additional discriminator is also employed allowing the model to deal with more complex structures. Results show that the developed model is stable and capable of generating physically optimal, previously unseen, funicular shells with smooth forms and high membrane factor distributions.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2026

A Graph Neural Network approach to zero-shot Digital Twins

Traditional Predictive Digital Twins often remain geometrically rigid, requiring extensive retraining or fine-tuning whenever the underlying physical domain or boundary conditions change. To overcome this limitation, we present a novel framework for \textit{Zero-Shot Digital Twins} that seamlessly couples real-time visual perception with a geometry-agnostic, physics-informed reasoning engine. At the core of our architecture is the Thermodynamics-Informed Graph Neural Network architecture, a Geometric Deep Learning solver grounded in a metriplectic thermodynamic formalism that enforces energy conservation and non-negative entropy production locally through graph message passing. The framework integrates an auxiliary Graph Neural Network to infer unobservable fields (such as stress tensors or velocity and energy distributions) directly from sparse initial visual boundaries, mitigating numerical start-up transients. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we implement a continuous closed-loop data assimilation mechanism; the pipeline tracks macroscopic deformations and free-surface fluid boundaries in real-time using deep segmentation networks combined with sparse optical flow, dynamically correcting the autoregressive simulation rollout and eliminating numerical drift. To test the validity of our approach, we demonstrate the extreme generalization capabilities of our approach across two disparate physical regimes: the large deformations of a viscoelastic beam and the non-linear sloshing of a viscous fluid. In both scenarios, the unified framework instantiates physically accurate simulations on novel, unseen geometries without case-specific retraining, operating well within real-time latency budgets (approximately 25 ms per frame) and enabling the direct projection of latent mechanical variables via Augmented Reality.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

A comparison of Single- and Double-generator formalisms for Thermodynamics-Informed Neural Networks

The development of inductive biases has been shown to be a very effective way to increase the accuracy and robustness of neural networks, particularly when they are used to predict physical phenomena. These biases significantly increase the certainty of predictions, decrease the error made and allow considerably smaller datasets to be used. There are a multitude of methods in the literature to develop these biases. One of the most effective ways, when dealing with physical phenomena, is to introduce physical principles of recognised validity into the network architecture. The problem becomes more complex without knowledge of the physical principles governing the phenomena under study. A very interesting possibility then is to turn to the principles of thermodynamics, which are universally valid, regardless of the level of abstraction of the description sought for the phenomenon under study. To ensure compliance with the principles of thermodynamics, there are formulations that have a long tradition in many branches of science. In the field of rheology, for example, two main types of formalisms are used to ensure compliance with these principles: one-generator and two-generator formalisms. In this paper we study the advantages and disadvantages of each, using classical problems with known solutions and synthetic data.

cs.LG↗