Burgers' PINNs with transfer learning by θ-scheme

The Burgers equation is a well-established test case in the computational modeling of several phenomena, such as fluid dynamics, gas dynamics, shock theory, cosmology and others. In this work, we present the application of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) with a transfer learning approach using the θ-scheme to solve the Burgers' equation. The proposed approach consists of searching for a discrete solution in time through a sequence of artificial neural networks (ANNs). At each time step, the previous ANN transfers its learning to the next network model, which learns the solution in the current time by minimizing a loss function based on the θ-scheme approximation of the Burgers' equation. To test this approach, we present its application to two benchmark problems with known analytical solutions. Compared to usual PINN models, the proposed approach has the advantage of requiring smaller neural network architectures with similar accurate results and potentially decreasing computational costs.