Electromagnetic-Thermal Analysis With FDTD and Physics-Informed Neural Networks

This article presents the coupling of the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method for electromagnetic field simulation, with a physics-informed neural network based solver for the heat equation. To this end, we employ a physics-informed U-Net instead of a numerical method to solve the heat equation. This approach enables the solution of general multiphysics problems with a single-physics numerical solver coupled with a neural network, overcoming the questions of accuracy and efficiency that are associated with interfacing multiphysics equations. By embedding the heat equation and its boundary conditions in the U-Net, we implement an unsupervised training methodology, which does not require the generation of ground-truth data. We test the proposed method with general 2-D coupled electromagnetic-thermal problems, demonstrating its accuracy and efficiency compared to standard finite-difference based alternatives.