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Shape-morphing programming of soft materials on complex geometries via neural operator

Published: January 16, 2026 | arXiv ID: 2601.11126v1

By: Lu Chen , Gengxiang Chen , Xu Liu and more

Potential Business Impact:

Designs complex shapes that change form.

Business Areas:
Natural Language Processing Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Software

Shape-morphing soft materials can enable diverse target morphologies through voxel-level material distribution design, offering significant potential for various applications. Despite progress in basic shape-morphing design with simple geometries, achieving advanced applications such as conformal implant deployment or aerodynamic morphing requires accurate and diverse morphing designs on complex geometries, which remains challenging. Here, we present a Spectral and Spatial Neural Operator (S2NO), which enables high-fidelity morphing prediction on complex geometries. S2NO effectively captures global and local morphing behaviours on irregular computational domains by integrating Laplacian eigenfunction encoding and spatial convolutions. Combining S2NO with evolutionary algorithms enables voxel-level optimisation of material distributions for shape morphing programming on various complex geometries, including irregular-boundary shapes, porous structures, and thin-walled structures. Furthermore, the neural operator's discretisation-invariant property enables super-resolution material distribution design, further expanding the diversity and complexity of morphing design. These advancements significantly improve the efficiency and capability of programming complex shape morphing.

Country of Origin
🇨🇳 China

Page Count
20 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Machine Learning (CS)