A Physics-Informed Manifold Neural Operator Framework for Multi-Parameter Prediction of Polymer Aging in HTPB Solid...

Predictive modeling of thermal aging in solid propellants is challenging because HTPB-based propellants are highly filled particle-reinforced polymer systems with sparse experimental data, nonlinear parameter coupling, and partially unclear aging mechanisms. This study proposes a Physics-Informed Manifold Neural Operator (PIMANO) framework for multi-parameter prediction of polymer aging in HTPB solid propellants. Accelerated thermal aging, stress relaxation, and swelling experiments were used to obtain aging temperature, aging time, crosslinking density, and viscoelastic Prony-series parameters. A continuous aging-state field was first reconstructed over the temperature-time domain by radial basis function interpolation. Crosslinking density was then introduced as a physically interpretable bridge-state variable linking aging conditions with viscoelastic responses. Among three candidate kinetic models, the modified Arrhenius-Avrami model gave the best fitting performance for crosslinking-density evolution, with R² = 0.988 and MRE = 0.0199. By combining local multi-scale neighborhood features, manifold latent representations, and DeepONet-based operator learning, PIMANO established a unified mapping from aging conditions to multi-parameter viscoelastic responses while incorporating bridge-state consistency, parameter non-negativity, and evolution-direction constraints. Under the RBF-augmented validation setting, PIMANO-ae achieved RMSE = 0.7847, MAE = 0.3366, R² = 0.9995, and MRE = 0.0027. Compared with the traditional model, RMSE, MAE, and MRE were reduced by 94.93%, 96.47%, and 96.85%, respectively. Temperature leave-one-out validation further yielded average R² values of 0.9469-0.9647 and MRE values of 4.98-6.21% at unseen aging temperatures. These results demonstrate that PIMANO provides an accurate, stable, and physically interpretable framework for multi-parameter aging prediction and life-assessment modeling of polymer-based energetic materials.