A Deep Learning Approach for Predicting Two-Dimensional Soil Consolidation Using Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINN)

The unidirectional consolidation theory of soils is widely used in certain conditions and approximate calculations. The multidirectional theory of soil consolidation is more reasonable than the unidirectional theory in practical applications but is much more complicated in terms of index determination and solution. To address the above problem, in this paper, we propose a deep learning method using physics-informed neural networks (PINN) to predict the excess pore water pressure of two-dimensional soil consolidation. In the proposed method, (1) a fully connected neural network is constructed; (2) the computational domain, partial differential equation (PDE), and constraints are defined to generate data for model training; and (3) the PDE of two-dimensional soil consolidation and the model of the neural network are connected to reduce the loss of the model. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by comparison with the numerical solution of PDE for two-dimensional consolidation. Moreover, the FEM and the proposed PINN-based method are applied to predict the consolidation of foundation soils in a real case of Sichuan Railway in China, and the results are quite consistent. The proposed deep learning approach can be used to investigate large and complex multidirectional soil consolidation.