JAX-FVM: A differentiable, entropy-stable finite volume solver on unstructured meshes for compressible flows

Abstract

We present JAX-FVM, an open-source, fully differentiable finite volume method (FVM) for the two-dimensional compressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations on unstructured triangular meshes. The solver is written entirely in JAX, so that every operation : mesh connectivity, flux evaluation, slope limiting, and time integration is just-in-time compiled, vectorised, and end-to-end differentiable through automatic differentiation (AD), and runs transparently on CPU or GPU. On the numerical side, JAX-FVM is built around an entropy-conservative Tadmor/Ismail-Roe two-point flux supplemented with entropy-variable Rusanov or Roe dissipation, second-order MUSCL reconstruction of primitive variables with least-squares gradients and Venkatakrishnan limiting, and a family of explicit (RK2-4) and matrix-free implicit (Newton, SDIRK2) time integrators whose Jacobian actions are obtained by AD. The combination of an unstructured-mesh compressible FVM with end-to-end differentiability fills a gap left by existing differentiable CFD frameworks, which are almost exclusively restricted to structured grids or spectral discretisations. We describe the governing equations, the discretisation, the software architecture, and a set of standard verification cases. The code is openly available at https://github.com/guigzair/jax_fvm.