An Extrinsic Approach Based on Physics-Informed Neural Networks for PDEs on Surfaces

In this paper, we propose an extrinsic approach based on physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for solving the partial differential equations (PDEs) on surfaces embedded in high dimensional space. PINNs are one of the deep learning-based techniques. Based on the training data and physical models, PINNs introduce the standard feedforward neural networks (NNs) to approximate the solutions to the PDE systems. Using automatic differentiation, the PDEs information could be encoded into NNs and a loss function. To deal with the surface differential operators in the loss function, we combine the extrinsic approach with PINNs and then express that loss function in extrinsic form. Subsequently, the loss function could be minimized extrinsically with respect to the NN parameters. Numerical results demonstrate that the extrinsic approach based on PINNs for surface problems has good accuracy and higher efficiency compared with the embedding approach based on PINNs. In addition, the strong nonlinear mapping ability of NNs makes this approach robust in solving time-dependent nonlinear problems on more complex surfaces.