Hypergraph Neural Network Surrogate Modeling for Prediction of Vortex- and Wake-Induced Vibrations

Abstract This study employs a finite-element inspired hypergraph neural network surrogate model to investigate the coupled dynamics of a freely oscillating cylinder in fluid flow, a well-established benchmark problem in vortex-induced and wake-induced vibration research. The presented methodology integrates high-fidelity numerical simulations based on variational finite-element methods with graph neural network surrogate modeling to forecast the spatio-temporal dynamics of flow-induced oscillations. The surrogate model utilizes graph-based representations to capture intricate fluid-structure interactions (FSIs), incorporating a multi-layer perceptron for mesh displacement updates and a hypergraph neural network for fluid-state predictions. Quantitative analyses demonstrate that the model could effectively learn from high-fidelity simulation data and provide stable and accurate predictions on unseen test data. These results underscore the potential of graph neural network-based methods for predicting fluid-structure interactions. This research supports the development of physics-based digital twins in marine and offshore engineering applications.