arXiv subjects

Nikolaus Adams

Publications and source records attributed to Nikolaus Adams.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Neptuna: A Comprehensive Machine Learning Framework for Benchmarking Complex Multiphase Flows

Compressible multiphase flows involving shocks and material interfaces arise in applications such as bubble collapse and droplet breakup, where strong nonlinear interactions produce complex interface deformation, mixing, and multiscale dynamics. Developing reliable machine learning surrogates for these flows remains challenging due to the simultaneous presence of compressibility, sharp discontinuities, and multiphase effects. In this work, we introduce the first large-scale benchmark specifically designed for shock-driven compressible multiphase flows, comprising 2.4 TB of high-fidelity 2D and 3D datasets featuring shock-induced bubble collapse and droplet breakup. We evaluate diverse surrogate model families on our benchmarking framework: Neptuna {https://github.com/tumaer/Neptuna}, including convolutional, spectral, transformer-based, and pre-trained PDE foundation models. Beyond standard MSE training, we investigate composite losses combining MSE with Sobolev, interface-aware, and structure-aware terms, together with adaptive loss balancing using SoftAdapt and GradNorm. Evaluation includes pointwise, spectral, feature-focused, structural, and physics-informed metrics. Results show that no single model performs best across all datasets and metrics, while composite losses significantly improve interface preservation and spectral fidelity. Among adaptive weighting strategies, SoftAdapt provides the most consistent improvements with almost no overhead compared to MSE-only training.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2025

The HydroGym Reinforcement Learning Platform for Fluid Dynamics

Modeling and controlling fluids is critical across science and engineering. Effective flow control can increase lift, reduce drag, enhance mixing, and attenuate noise, potentially unlocking new technologies. Yet controlling fluids is hard: the dynamics are high-dimensional, nonlinear, and multiscale. While reinforcement learning (RL) has recently succeeded in robotics and protein folding through shared benchmarks, fluid dynamics has resisted such progress: each controller is typically tuned to a single geometry and operating point, making results hard to accumulate, transfer, and compare. We introduce HydroGym, a solver-independent RL platform for flow control, and show that standardized infrastructure unlocks transferable control intelligence across flow regimes. HydroGym provides 61+ validated environments spanning laminar to turbulent flows, with systematic Reynolds number progressions up to Re=400,000 and Mach number variations in 2D and 3D. It supports diverse backends, including finite-volume, spectral-element, finite-element, lattice-Boltzmann, and fully differentiable solvers for gradient-enhanced optimization. Across environments, RL agents consistently discover robust control principles, such as boundary-layer manipulation, acoustic-feedback disruption, and wake reorganization, yielding drag reductions exceeding 90% in canonical configurations. Critically, we demonstrate zero-shot transfer: agents trained only on a simplified channel flow achieve 38% friction-drag reduction on an unseen 3D wing section at chord Reynolds number Re=200,000 reducing exploration costs by four orders of magnitude versus direct on-wing optimization. This suggests RL agents uncover essential physics rather than configuration-specific patterns, pointing toward generalizable control. HydroGym offers extensible, scalable community infrastructure for fluid dynamics, machine learning, and control research.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2024

Towards high-order consistency and convergence of conservative SPH approximations

Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) offers distinct advantages for modeling many engineering problems, yet achieving high-order consistency in its conservative formulation remains to be addressed. While zero- and higher-order consistencies can be obtained using particle-pair differences and the kernel gradient correction (KGC) approaches, respectively, for SPH gradient approximations, their applicability for discretizing conservation laws in practical simulations is limited due to their non-conservative feature. Although the standard anti-symmetric SPH approximation is able to achieve conservative zero-order consistency through particle relaxation, its straightforward extensions with the KGC fail to satisfy either zero- or higher-order consistency. In this paper, we propose the reverse KGC (RKGC) formulation, which is conservative and able to precisely satisfy both zero- and first-order consistencies when particles are relaxed based on the KGC matrix. Extensive numerical examples show that the new formulation considerably improves the accuracy of the Lagrangian SPH method. In particular, it is able to resolve the long-standing high-dissipation issue for simulating free-surface flows. Furthermore, with fully relaxed particles, it enhances the accuracy of the Eulerian SPH method even when the ratio between the smoothing length and the particle spacing is considerably reduced. Indeed, the reverse KGC formulation holds the potential for the extension to even higher-order consistencies. However, addressing the corresponding particle relaxation problem remains a pending challenge.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2024

Amplification of supersonic micro-jets by resonant inertial cavitation-bubble pair

We reveal for the first time by experiments that within a narrow parameter regime, two cavitation bubbles with identical energy generated in anti-phase develop a supersonic jet. High-resolution numerical simulation shows a mechanism for jet amplification based on toroidal shock wave and bubble necking interaction. The micro-jet reaches velocities in excess of 1000 m/s. We demonstrate that potential flow approximation established for Worthington jets accurately predicts the evolution of the bubble gas-liquid interfaces.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2023

A diffusive wetting model for water entry/exit based on the weakly-compressible SPH method

This paper proposes a diffusive wetting model for the weakly-compressible smoothed particle hydrodynamics (WCSPH) method to simulate individual water entry/exit as well as the complete process from water entry to exit. The model is composed of a physically consistent diffusive wetting equation to describe the wetting evolution at the fluid-solid interface, a wetting-coupled identification approach to determine the type of fluid particles by taking into account the wetting degree of the contacted solid, and a numerical regularization on the fluid particles at fully wetted fluid-solid interface. The accuracy, efficiency, and versatility of the present model are validated through qualitative and quantitative comparisons with experiments, including the 3-D water entry of a sphere, the 2-D water entry/exit of a cylinder, and the complete process from water entry to exit of a 2-D cylinder.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2022

Physics-informed neural networks for inverse problems in supersonic flows

Accurate solutions to inverse supersonic compressible flow problems are often required for designing specialized aerospace vehicles. In particular, we consider the problem where we have data available for density gradients from Schlieren photography as well as data at the inflow and part of wall boundaries. These inverse problems are notoriously difficult and traditional methods may not be adequate to solve such ill-posed inverse problems. To this end, we employ the physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and its extended version, extended PINNs (XPINNs), where domain decomposition allows deploying locally powerful neural networks in each subdomain, which can provide additional expressivity in subdomains, where a complex solution is expected. Apart from the governing compressible Euler equations, we also enforce the entropy conditions in order to obtain viscosity solutions. Moreover, we enforce positivity conditions on density and pressure. We consider inverse problems involving two-dimensional expansion waves, two-dimensional oblique and bow shock waves. We compare solutions obtained by PINNs and XPINNs and invoke some theoretical results that can be used to decide on the generalization errors of the two methods.

math.NA↗

arXiv2021

Consistent and symmetry preserving data-driven interface reconstruction for the level-set method

Recently, machine learning has been used to substitute parts of conventional computational fluid dynamics, e.g. the cell-face reconstruction in finite-volume solvers or the curvature computation in the Volume-of-Fluid (VOF) method. The latter showed improvements in terms of accuracy for coarsely resolved interfaces, however at the expense of convergence and symmetry. In this work, a combined approach is proposed, adressing the aforementioned shortcomings. We focus on interface reconstruction (IR) in the level-set method, i.e. the computation of the volume fraction and apertures. The combined model consists of a classification neural network, that chooses between the conventional (linear) IR and the neural network IR depending on the local interface resolution. The proposed approach improves accuracy for coarsely resolved interfaces and recovers the conventional IR for high resolutions, yielding first order overall convergence. Symmetry is preserved by mirroring and rotating the input level-set grid and subsequently averaging the predictions. The combined model is implemented into a CFD solver and demonstrated for two-phase flows. Furthermore, we provide details of floating point symmetric implementation and computational efficiency.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2020

A Feature-aware SPH for Isotropic Unstructured Mesh Generation

In this paper, we present a feature-aware SPH method for the concurrent and automated isotropic unstructured mesh generation. Two additional objectives are achieved with the proposed method compared to the original SPH-based mesh generator (Fu et al., 2019). First, a feature boundary correction term is introduced to address the issue of incomplete kernel support at the boundary vicinity. The mesh generation of feature curves, feature surfaces and volumes can be handled concurrently without explicitly following a dimensional sequence. Second, a two-phase model is proposed to characterize the mesh-generation procedure by a feature-size-adaptation phase and a mesh-quality-optimization phase. By proposing a new error measurement criterion and an adaptive control system with two sets of simulation parameters, the objectives of faster feature-size adaptation and local mesh-quality improvement are merged into a consistent framework. The proposed method is validated with a set of 2D and 3D numerical tests with different complexities and scales. The results demonstrate that high-quality meshes are generated with a significant speedup of convergence.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2019

A Consistent Parallel Isotropic Unstructured Mesh Generation Method based on Multi-phase SPH

In this paper, we propose a consistent parallel unstructured mesh generator based on a multi-phase SPH method. A set of physics-motivated modeling equations are developed to achieve the targets of domain decomposition, communication volume optimization and high-quality unstructured mesh generation simultaneously. A unified density field is defined as the target function for both partitioning the geometry and distributing the mesh-vertexes. A multi-phase Smoothing Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method is employed to solve the governing equations. All the optimization targets are achieved implicitly and consistently by the particle relaxation procedure without constructing triangulation/tetrahedralization explicitly. The target of communication reduction is achieved by introducing a surface tension model between distinct partitioning sub-domains, which are characterized by colored SPH particles. The resulting partitioning diagram features physically localized sub-domains and optimized interface communication. The target of optimizing the mesh quality is achieved by introducing a tailored equation-of-state (EOS) and a smooth isotropic kernel function. The mesh quality near the interface of neighboring sub-domains is improved by gradually removing the surface-tension force once a steady state is achieved. The proposed method is developed basing on a new parallel environment for multi-resolution SPH to exploit both coarse- and fine-grained parallelism. A set of benchmarks are conducted to verify that all the optimization targets are achieved consistently within the current framework.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2018

Positivity-preserving method for multi-resolution simulations of compressible flows

We present a positivity-preserving method for multi-resolution simulations of compressible flows involving extreme conditions such as near vacuum and strong discontinuities. The novelty of this work is due to two aspects. First we extend the positivity-preserving flux limiter of (Hu et al., J Comput Phys 242, 2013) to the multi-resolution framework by modifying the prediction operator, based on the same limiting concept. Second, we develop a positivity-preserving local time stepping scheme for adaptive time marching. Instead of using fixed hierarchical time steps, the local time stepping scheme dynamically adjusts the time steps of all multi-resolution levels to maintain positivity. The method is validated and its capabilities are demonstrated by a range of test cases.

physics.comp-ph↗