Applied Sciences (Mar 2022)
A Cost-Efficient Approach towards Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulations on Quantum Devices
Abstract
Numerical simulations of physical systems are found in many industries, as they currently play a crucial role in product development. There are many numerical methods for solving differential equations that describe the underlying physics behind the mathematical models in the simulation, among which, the finite element method (FEM) is one of the most commonly used. Although in many applications the FEM seems to provide an acceptable solution to the problem, there are still many complex real-life processes that can be challenging to simulate numerically due to their complexity and large size. Recently, there has been a shift in research towards efficiently applying quantum algorithms in finite element analysis (FEA), as the potential and speedup that they could offer have been shown, but little to no effort has been made towards the applicability and cost efficiency of these algorithms in real-world quantum devices. In this paper, we propose a cost-efficient method for applying quantum algorithms in FEA for industrial problems post-processed by classical algorithms in order to address the limitations of available quantum hardware and their cost when accessing them through different cloud-based services. We carry this out by approximating the solution of the initially large system with a suitable quantum algorithm and using the obtained solutions to generate a set of reduced-order models (ROMs) that are much smaller in complexity and size than the original model. This allows the simulation of the original model with different parameter sets and excitations to be run efficiently on classical computers without having the need to access quantum subroutines again. This way, we have reduced the usage of quantum hardware (and thus the development cost) while still taking advantage of its quantum speedup.
Keywords
