Transformer model predicts engineering fields directly from CAD designs
CAD-Native Transformer Operators for AI-Aided Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Summary
Engineering designs like cars and planes are created using smooth digital models called CAD. Usually, to test how these designs perform, the models are turned into simpler shapes for simulations, which takes extra time and effort. The authors created a new AI method called CANTO that works directly with the original smooth CAD models without needing these extra steps. This makes predictions about things like air pressure more accurate and faster. It can also help improve designs by showing how small changes affect performance.
What this means in practice
- •For automotive engineers: Predict aerodynamic fields from CAD models without meshing to speed up vehicle design cycles.
- •For aerospace designers: Improve aircraft design by accurately predicting pressure and flow fields directly from CAD for better optimization.
Authors
Daniel Leibovici, Nikola Borislavov Kovachki, Dawon Ahn, Ruben Ohana, Ira J. S. Shokar, Abouzar Ghasemi, Semih Akkurt, Rishikesh Ranade, Neil Ashton, Jan Kautz, Jean Kossaifi
Abstract
Modern engineering systems, from automobiles to aircraft, are designed by using precise, continuous parametric computer-aided design (CAD) models. Evaluating design changes through numerical simulation requires meshing the continuous geometry, a computationally expensive and often brittle process that can require manual intervention and replaces the continuous representation with a discrete approximation. Most neural surrogates accelerate the simulation, but inherit this representation gap by relying on meshes, point clouds, voxels, or other sampled approximations of geometry. We introduce CANTO, a transformer neural operator that maps directly from continuous CAD geometry to physical fields, without meshing the input geometry. We develop a theoretical framework for learning operators from geometric manifolds to function spaces of physical fields, representing geometry through sequences of parametric patches. CANTO instantiates this framework by directly tokenizing non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) patches from their control points, knot vectors, and weights, and predicts continuous surface and volume fields at arbitrary query locations. We evaluate CANTO on four automotive and aircraft aerodynamics industry benchmarks: AhmedML, WindsorML, DrivAerML, and HiLiftAeroML. CANTO achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on most evaluated surface and volume prediction tasks, including a 19.8% reduction in surface-pressure relative $L_2$ error compared with AB-UPT on HiLiftAeroML. Differentiability with respect to CAD parameters further enables gradient-based inverse design of designs. On AhmedML, CANTO identifies designs with 4.4 to 20.4% lower drag than the best dataset designs satisfying the same volume and lift constraints, with the improvements verified using the same CFD setup used to generate the original dataset.