AI CFD Scientist: Toward Open-Ended Computational Fluid Dynamics Discovery with Physics-Aware AI Agents

Nithin Somasekharan; Rabi Pathak; Manushri Dhanakoti; Tingwen Zhang; Ling Yue; Andy Zhu; Shaowu Pan

title

authors

Nithin Somasekharan, Rabi Pathak, Manushri Dhanakoti, Tingwen Zhang, Ling Yue, Andy Zhu, Shaowu Pan

date

2026-05-12

venue

arXiv (preprint, not peer reviewed)

arXiv:2605.06607

affiliation

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

upvotes

2 (Hugging Face Daily Papers, 2026-11-01)

links

abs pdf hf code

abstract

Recent LLM-based agents have closed substantial portions of the scientific discovery loop in software-only machine-learning research, in chemistry, and in biology. Extending the same loop to high-fidelity physical simulators is harder, because solver completion does not imply physical validity and many failure modes appear only in field-level imagery rather than in solver logs. We present AI CFD Scientist, an open-source AI scientist for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) that, to our knowledge, is the first to span literature-grounded ideation, validated execution, vision-based physics verification, source-code modification, and figure-grounded writing within a single inspectable workflow. Three coupled pathways cover parameter sweeps within a fixed solver, case-local C++ library compilation for new physical models, and open-ended hypothesis search against a reference comparator, all running on OpenFOAM through Foam-Agent. At the center of the framework is a vision-language physics-verification gate that inspects rendered flow fields before any result is accepted, rerun, or written into a manuscript. On five tasks under a shared GPT-5.5 backbone, AI CFD Scientist autonomously discovers a Spalart-Allmaras runtime correction that reduces lower-wall Cf RMSE against DNS by 7.89% on the periodic hill at Reh=5600; under matched LLM cost, two strong general AI-scientist baselines (ARIS, DeepScientist) execute partial CFD workflows but lack the domain-specific validity gates needed to convert runs into defensible scientific claims; and a controlled planted-failure ablation shows that the vision-language gate detects 14 of 16 silent failures missed by solver-level checks. Code, prompts, and run artifacts are released at https://github.com/csml-rpi/cfd-scientist.

@misc{somasekharan2026ai,
  title={AI CFD Scientist: Toward Open-Ended Computational Fluid Dynamics Discovery with Physics-Aware AI Agents},
  author={Nithin Somasekharan and Rabi Pathak and Manushri Dhanakoti and Tingwen Zhang and Ling Yue and Andy Zhu and Shaowu Pan},
  year={2026},
  eprint={2605.06607},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06607}
}