Deep Learning based FEA Surrogate for Sub-Sea Pressure Vessel

During the design process of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), the pressure vessel has a critical role. The pressure vessel contains dry electronics, power sources, and other sensors that cannot be flooded. A traditional design approach for a pressure vessel design involves running multiple Finite Element Analysis (FEA) based simulations and optimizing the design to find the best suitable design which meets the requirement. Running these FEAs are computationally very costly for any optimization process and it becomes difficult to run even hundreds of evaluation. In such a case, a better approach is the surrogate design with the goal of replacing FEA-based prediction with some learning-based regressor. Once the surrogate is trained for a class of problem, then the learned response surface can be used to analyze the stress effect without running the FEA for that class of problem. The challenge of creating a surrogate for a class of problems is data generation. Since the process is computationally costly, it is not possible to densely sample the design space and the learning response surface on sparse data set becomes difficult. During experimentation, we observed that a Deep Learning-based surrogate outperforms other regression models on such sparse data. In the present work, we are utilizing the Deep Learning-based model to replace the costly finite element analysis-based simulation process. By creating the surrogate, we speed up the prediction on the other design much faster than direct Finite element Analysis. We also compared our DL-based surrogate with other classical Machine Learning (ML) based regression models (random forest and Gradient Boost regressor). We observed on the sparser data, the DL-based surrogate performs much better than other regression models.