The University of Southampton
University of Southampton Institutional Repository

LaDEEP: a deep learning-based surrogate model for large deformation of elastic-plastic solids

LaDEEP: a deep learning-based surrogate model for large deformation of elastic-plastic solids
LaDEEP: a deep learning-based surrogate model for large deformation of elastic-plastic solids
Scientific computing for large deformation of elastic-plastic solids is critical for numerous real-world applications. Classical numerical solvers rely primarily on local discrete linear approximation and are constrained by an inherent trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Recently, deep learning models have achieved impressive progress in solving the continuum mechanism. While previous models have explored various architectures and constructed coefficient-solution mappings, they are designed for general instances without considering specific problem properties and hard to accurately handle with complex elastic-plastic solids involving contact, loading and unloading. In this work, we take stretch bending, a popular metal fabrication technique, as our case study and introduce LaDEEP, a deep learning-based surrogate model for La rge De formation of Elastic-Plastic Solids. We encode the partitioned regions of the involved slender solids into a token sequence to maintain their essential order property. To characterize the physical process of the solid deformation, a two-stage Transformer-based module is designed to predict the deformation with the sequence of tokens as input. Empirically, LaDEEP achieves five magnitudes faster speed than finite element methods with a comparable accuracy, and gains 20.47% relative improvement on average compared to other deep learning baselines. We have also deployed our model into a real-world industrial production system, and it has shown remarkable performance in both accuracy and efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/therontau0054/LaDEEP.
deep learning, elastic-plastic solid, large deformation, stretch bending of metal
2154-817X
4901-4912
Association for Computing Machinery
Tao, Shilong
6265e989-7a83-47f9-a601-db7089a7eaab
Feng, Zhe
4117a5ab-48cf-4dd6-a250-5525ee762a1c
Sun, Haonan
170ff5da-63d1-4e4c-9340-743e1536e513
Zhu, Zhanxing
e55e7385-8ba2-4a85-8bae-e00defb7d7f0
Liu, Yunhuai
6a781cb8-dc4d-4a18-b51f-699cbba1b7d6
Tao, Shilong
6265e989-7a83-47f9-a601-db7089a7eaab
Feng, Zhe
4117a5ab-48cf-4dd6-a250-5525ee762a1c
Sun, Haonan
170ff5da-63d1-4e4c-9340-743e1536e513
Zhu, Zhanxing
e55e7385-8ba2-4a85-8bae-e00defb7d7f0
Liu, Yunhuai
6a781cb8-dc4d-4a18-b51f-699cbba1b7d6

Tao, Shilong, Feng, Zhe, Sun, Haonan, Zhu, Zhanxing and Liu, Yunhuai (2025) LaDEEP: a deep learning-based surrogate model for large deformation of elastic-plastic solids. In KDD '25: Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. vol. 2, Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 4901-4912 . (doi:10.1145/3711896.3737238).

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Scientific computing for large deformation of elastic-plastic solids is critical for numerous real-world applications. Classical numerical solvers rely primarily on local discrete linear approximation and are constrained by an inherent trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Recently, deep learning models have achieved impressive progress in solving the continuum mechanism. While previous models have explored various architectures and constructed coefficient-solution mappings, they are designed for general instances without considering specific problem properties and hard to accurately handle with complex elastic-plastic solids involving contact, loading and unloading. In this work, we take stretch bending, a popular metal fabrication technique, as our case study and introduce LaDEEP, a deep learning-based surrogate model for La rge De formation of Elastic-Plastic Solids. We encode the partitioned regions of the involved slender solids into a token sequence to maintain their essential order property. To characterize the physical process of the solid deformation, a two-stage Transformer-based module is designed to predict the deformation with the sequence of tokens as input. Empirically, LaDEEP achieves five magnitudes faster speed than finite element methods with a comparable accuracy, and gains 20.47% relative improvement on average compared to other deep learning baselines. We have also deployed our model into a real-world industrial production system, and it has shown remarkable performance in both accuracy and efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/therontau0054/LaDEEP.

Text
3711896.3737238 - Version of Record
Restricted to Repository staff only
Request a copy

More information

Published date: 3 August 2025
Keywords: deep learning, elastic-plastic solid, large deformation, stretch bending of metal

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 507301
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/507301
ISSN: 2154-817X
PURE UUID: 91ffab63-30c5-4fc9-8ec1-cfd064662eaa
ORCID for Zhanxing Zhu: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-2141-6553

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 03 Dec 2025 17:37
Last modified: 04 Dec 2025 03:05

Export record

Altmetrics

Contributors

Author: Shilong Tao
Author: Zhe Feng
Author: Haonan Sun
Author: Zhanxing Zhu ORCID iD
Author: Yunhuai Liu

Download statistics

Downloads from ePrints over the past year. Other digital versions may also be available to download e.g. from the publisher's website.

View more statistics

Atom RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0

Contact ePrints Soton: eprints@soton.ac.uk

ePrints Soton supports OAI 2.0 with a base URL of http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/cgi/oai2

This repository has been built using EPrints software, developed at the University of Southampton, but available to everyone to use.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we will assume that you are happy to receive cookies on the University of Southampton website.

×