Operator learning regularization for macroscopic permeability prediction in dual-scale flow problem

Abstract: Liquid composites moulding is an important manufacturing technology for fibre reinforced composites, due to its cost-effectiveness. Challenges lie in the optimisation of the process due to the lack of understanding of key characteristic of textile fabrics - permeability. The problem of computing the permeability coefficient can be modelled as the well-known Stokes-Brinkman equation, which introduces a heterogeneous parameter $\beta$ distinguishing macropore regions and fibre-bundle regions. In the present work, we train a Fourier neural operator to learn the nonlinear map from the heterogeneous coefficient $\beta$ to the velocity field $u$, and recover the corresponding macroscopic permeability $K$. This is a challenging inverse problem since both the input and output fields span several order of magnitudes, we introduce different regularization techniques for the loss function and perform a quantitative comparison between them.