Hard-constraining Neumann boundary conditions in physics-informed neural networks via Fourier feature embeddings

We present a novel approach to hard-constrain Neumann boundary conditions in physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) using Fourier feature embeddings. Neumann boundary conditions are used to described critical processes in various application, yet they are more challenging to hard-constrain in PINNs than Dirichlet conditions. Our method employs specific Fourier feature embeddings to directly incorporate Neumann boundary conditions into the neural network's architecture instead of learning them. The embedding can be naturally extended by high frequency modes to better capture high frequency phenomena. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through experiments on a diffusion problem, for which our method outperforms existing hard-constraining methods and classical PINNs, particularly in multiscale and high frequency scenarios.

Continuously Adapting Random Sampling (CARS) for Power Electronics Parameter Design

To date, power electronics parameter design tasks are usually tackled using detailed optimization approaches with detailed simulations or using brute force grid search grid search with very fast simulations. A new method, named "Continuously Adapting Random Sampling" (CARS) is proposed, which provides a continuous method in between. This allows for very fast, and / or large amounts of simulations, but increasingly focuses on the most promising parameter ranges. Inspirations are drawn from multi-armed bandit research and lead to prioritized sampling of sub-domains in one high-dimensional parameter tensor. Performance has been evaluated on three exemplary power electronic use-cases, where resulting designs appear competitive to genetic algorithms, but additionally allow for highly parallelizable simulation, as well as continuous progression between explorative and exploitative settings.