EquiNO: A Physics-Informed Neural Operator for Multiscale Simulations

Multiscale problems are ubiquitous in physics. Numerical simulations of such problems by solving partial differential equations (PDEs) at high resolution are computationally too expensive for many-query scenarios, such as uncertainty quantification, remeshing applications, and topology optimization. This limitation has motivated the development of data-driven surrogate models, where microscale computations are substituted by black-box mappings between macroscale quantities. While these approaches offer significant speedups, they typically struggle to incorporate microscale physical constraints, such as the balance of linear momentum. In this contribution, we propose the Equilibrium Neural Operator (EquiNO), a physics-informed PDE surrogate in which equilibrium is hard-enforced by construction. EquiNO achieves this by projecting the solution onto a set of divergence-free basis functions obtained via proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), thereby ensuring satisfaction of equilibrium without relying on penalty terms or multi-objective loss functions. We compare EquiNO with variational physics-informed neural and operator networks that enforce physical constraints only weakly through the loss function, as well as with purely data-driven operator-learning baselines. Our framework, applicable to multiscale FE$^{\,2}$ computations, introduces a finite element-operator learning (FE-OL) approach that integrates the finite element (FE) method with operator learning (OL). We apply the proposed methodology to quasi-static problems in solid mechanics and demonstrate that FE-OL yields accurate solutions even when trained on restricted datasets. The results show that EquiNO achieves speedup factors exceeding 8000-fold compared to traditional methods and offers a robust and physically consistent alternative to existing data-driven surrogate models.