RheOPT: Few-Shot Non-Newtonian Flow Prediction via Newtonian Pretraining of RheOFormer

Maedeh Saberi, Amir Barati Farimani, Safa Jamali

Despite advances in numerical methods, non-Newtonian flow simulations remain computationally expensive because velocity and stress must be advanced together through rate- and history-dependent constitutive dynamics. Neural-operator surrogates reduce inference cost after training, but their training data require the same expensive simulations they aim to replace, making data-efficient learning essential when only a few non-Newtonian simulations can be afforded. Here, we introduce the Rheological Operator Pretrained Transformer (RheOPT), which pretrains a transformer-based neural operator on inexpensive Newtonian simulations and fine-tunes it on a small number of non-Newtonian samples. Rather than transferring the Newtonian constitutive response itself, RheOPT reuses geometry-conditioned transport structure that remains useful after the stress model changes. We evaluate RheOPT in two geometry-matched settings: a $4{:}1$ contraction channel for Giesekus, Oldroyd-B, and Bingham fluids, and the oscillatory wake behind a triangular obstacle for Oldroyd-B flow. In the contraction, Newtonian pretraining substantially improves few-shot prediction, and a model fine-tuned on four target…