Physics-informed deep learning for multi-species membrane separations

Conventional continuum models for ion transport across polyamide membranes require solving partial differential equations (PDEs). These models typically introduce a host of assumptions and simplifications to improve the computational tractability of existing solvers. As a consequence of these constraints, conventional models struggle to generalize predictive performance to new unseen conditions. Deep learning has recently shown promise in alleviating many of these concerns, making it a promising avenue for surrogate models that can replace conventional PDE-based approaches. In this work, we develop a physics-informed deep learning model to predict ion transport across polyamide membranes. The proposed architecture leverages neural differential equations in conjunction with classical closure models as inductive biases directly encoded into the neural framework. The neural methods are pre-trained on simulated data from continuum models and fine-tuned on independent experiments to learn multi-ionic rejection behaviour. We also harness the attention mechanism, commonly observed in language modelling, to learn and infer key ion-pairing relationships. Gaussian noise augmentations from experimental uncertainty estimates are also introduced into the measured data to improve robustness and generalization. We study the neural framework’s performance relative to conventional PDE-based methods, and also compare the use of hard/soft inductive bias constraints on prediction accuracy. Lastly, we compare our approach to other competitive deep learning architectures and illustrate strong agreement with experimental measurements across all studied datasets.