Graph Neural Network Surrogates for Contacting Deformable Bodies with Necessary and Sufficient Contact Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dubey, Vijay K., Haese, Collin E., Gültekin, Osman, Dalton, David, Rausch, Manuel K., Fuhg, Jan N.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Dubey, Vijay K.
Haese, Collin E.
Gültekin, Osman
Dalton, David
Rausch, Manuel K.
Fuhg, Jan N.
author_facet Dubey, Vijay K.
Haese, Collin E.
Gültekin, Osman
Dalton, David
Rausch, Manuel K.
Fuhg, Jan N.
contents Surrogate models for the rapid inference of nonlinear boundary value problems in mechanics are helpful in a broad range of engineering applications. However, effective surrogate modeling of applications involving the contact of deformable bodies, especially in the context of varying geometries, is still an open issue. In particular, existing methods are confined to rigid body contact or, at best, contact between rigid and soft objects with well-defined contact planes. Furthermore, they employ contact or collision detection filters that serve as a rapid test but use only the necessary and not sufficient conditions for detection. In this work, we present a graph neural network architecture that utilizes continuous collision detection and, for the first time, incorporates sufficient conditions designed for contact between soft deformable bodies. We test its performance on two benchmarks, including a problem in soft tissue mechanics of predicting the closed state of a bioprosthetic aortic valve. We find a regularizing effect on adding additional contact terms to the loss function, leading to better generalization of the network. These benefits hold for simple contact at similar planes and element normal angles, and complex contact at differing planes and element normal angles. We also demonstrate that the framework can handle varying reference geometries. However, such benefits come with high computational costs during training, resulting in a trade-off that may not always be favorable. We quantify the training cost and the resulting inference speedups on various hardware architectures. Importantly, our graph neural network implementation results in up to a thousand-fold speedup for our benchmark problems at inference.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_13459
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Graph Neural Network Surrogates for Contacting Deformable Bodies with Necessary and Sufficient Contact Detection
Dubey, Vijay K.
Haese, Collin E.
Gültekin, Osman
Dalton, David
Rausch, Manuel K.
Fuhg, Jan N.
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Numerical Analysis
Surrogate models for the rapid inference of nonlinear boundary value problems in mechanics are helpful in a broad range of engineering applications. However, effective surrogate modeling of applications involving the contact of deformable bodies, especially in the context of varying geometries, is still an open issue. In particular, existing methods are confined to rigid body contact or, at best, contact between rigid and soft objects with well-defined contact planes. Furthermore, they employ contact or collision detection filters that serve as a rapid test but use only the necessary and not sufficient conditions for detection. In this work, we present a graph neural network architecture that utilizes continuous collision detection and, for the first time, incorporates sufficient conditions designed for contact between soft deformable bodies. We test its performance on two benchmarks, including a problem in soft tissue mechanics of predicting the closed state of a bioprosthetic aortic valve. We find a regularizing effect on adding additional contact terms to the loss function, leading to better generalization of the network. These benefits hold for simple contact at similar planes and element normal angles, and complex contact at differing planes and element normal angles. We also demonstrate that the framework can handle varying reference geometries. However, such benefits come with high computational costs during training, resulting in a trade-off that may not always be favorable. We quantify the training cost and the resulting inference speedups on various hardware architectures. Importantly, our graph neural network implementation results in up to a thousand-fold speedup for our benchmark problems at inference.
title Graph Neural Network Surrogates for Contacting Deformable Bodies with Necessary and Sufficient Contact Detection
topic Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Numerical Analysis
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13459