[angry_moose]

I've been "lucky" enough to get to trial some AI FEM-like structural solvers.

At best, they're sortof ok for linear, small deformation problems. The kind of models where we could get an exact solution in ~5 minutes vs a fairly sloppy solution in ~30 seconds. Start throwing anything non-linear in and they just fall apart.

Maybe enough to do some very high-level concept selection but even that isn't great. I'm reasonably convinced some of them are just "curvature detectors" - make anything straight blue, anything with high curvature red, and interpolate everything else.

[amelius]

Could you use these models as a preconditioner in an iterative solver?

[angry_moose]

I don't see any reason its not theoretically possible but I doubt it would be that beneficial.

You'd have to map the results back onto the traditional model which has overhead; and using shaky results as a precondition is going to negate a lot of the benefits, especially if its (incorrectly) predicting the part is already in the non-linear stress range which I've seen before. Force balances are all over the place as well (if they even bother to predict them at all, which its not always clear) so it could even be starting from a very unstable point.

Its relatively trivial to just use the native solution from a linear solution as the starting point instead, which is basically what is done anyway with auto time stepping.

[xeonmc]

So it’s more like a “second principles” solver, it cannot synthesize anything that it hadn’t already seen before.