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Topology optimization algorithms often employ a smooth density function to implicitly represent geometries in a discretized domain. While this implicit representation offers great flexibility to parametrize the optimized geometry, it also leads to a transition region. Previous approaches, such as the Solid Isotropic Material Penalty (SIMP) method, have been proposed to modify the objective function aiming to converge toward integer density values and eliminate this non-physical transition region. However, the iterative nature of topology optimization renders this process computationally demanding, emphasizing the importance of achieving fast convergence. Accelerating convergence without significantly compromising the final solution can be challenging. In this work, we introduce a machine learning approach that leverages the message-passing Graph Neural Network (GNN) to eliminate the non-physical transition zone for the topology optimization problems. By representing the optimized structures as weighted graphs, we introduce a generalized filtering algorithm based on the topology of the spatial discretization. As such, the resultant algorithm can be applied to two- and three-dimensional space for both Cartesian (structured grid) and non-Cartesian discretizations (e.g. polygon finite element). The numerical experiments indicate that applying this filter throughout the optimization process may avoid excessive iterations and enable a more efficient optimization procedure. 

Abstract We present a machine learning framework capable of consistently inferring mathematical expressions of hyperelastic energy functionals for incompressible materials from sparse experimental data and physical laws. To achieve this goal, we propose a polyconvex neural additive model (PNAM) that enables us to express the hyperelastic model in a learnable feature space while enforcing polyconvexity. An upshot of this feature space obtained via the PNAM is that (1) it is spanned by a set of univariate basis functions that can be re‐parametrized with a more complex mathematical form, and (2) the resultant elasticity model is guaranteed to fulfill the polyconvexity, which ensures that the acoustic tensor remains elliptic for any deformation. To further improve the interpretability, we use genetic programming to convert each univariate basis into a compact mathematical expression. The resultant multi‐variable mathematical models obtained from this proposed framework are not only more interpretable but are also proven to fulfill physical laws. By controlling the compactness of the learned symbolic form, the machine learning‐generated mathematical model also requires fewer arithmetic operations than its deep neural network counterparts during deployment. This latter attribute is crucial for scaling large‐scale simulations where the constitutive responses of every integration point must be updated within each incremental time step. We compare our proposed model discovery framework against other state‐of‐the‐art alternatives to assess the robustness and efficiency of the training algorithms and examine the trade‐off between interpretability, accuracy, and precision of the learned symbolic hyperelastic models obtained from different approaches. Our numerical results suggest that our approach extrapolates well outside the training data regime due to the precise incorporation of physics‐based knowledge. 

This review article highlights state-of-the-art data-driven techniques to discover, encode, surrogate, or emulate constitutive laws that describe the path-independent and path-dependent response of solids. Our objective is to provide an organized taxonomy to a large spectrum of methodologies developed in the past decades and to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the various techniques for interpreting and forecasting mechanics behavior across different scales. Distinguishing between machine-learning-based and model-free methods, we further categorize approaches based on their interpretability and on their learning process/type of required data, while discussing the key problems of generalization and trustworthiness. We attempt to provide a road map of how these can be reconciled in a data-availability-aware context. We also touch upon relevant aspects such as data sampling techniques, design of experiment, verification, and validation. 

The yield surface of a material is a criterion at which macroscopic plastic deformation begins. For crystalline solids, plastic deformation occurs through the motion of dislocations, which can be captured by discrete dislocation dynamics (DDD) simulations. In this paper, we predict the yield surfaces and strain-hardening behaviors using DDD simulations and a geometric manifold learning approach. The yield surfaces in the three-dimensional space of plane stress are constructed for single-crystal copper subjected to uniaxial loading along the [100] and [110] directions, respectively. With increasing plastic deformation under loading, the yield surface expands nearly uniformly in all directions, corresponding to isotropic hardening. In contrast, under [110] loading, latent hardening is observed, where the yield surface remains nearly unchanged in the orientations in the vicinity of the loading direction itself but expands in other directions, resulting in an asymmetric shape. This difference in hardening behaviors is attributed to the different dislocation multiplication behaviors on various slip systems under the two loading conditions. 

This paper introduces a neural kernel method to generate machine learning plasticity models for micropolar and micromorphic materials that lack material symmetry and have internal structures. Since these complex materials often require higher-dimensional parametric space to be precisely characterized, we introduce a representation learning step where we first learn a feature vector space isomorphic to a finite-dimensional subspace of the original parametric function space from the augmented labeled data expanded from the narrow band of the yield data. This approach simplifies the data augmentation step and enables us to constitute the high-dimensional yield surface in a feature space spanned by the feature kernels. In the numerical examples, we first verified the implementations with data generated from known models, then tested the capacity of the models to discover feature spaces from meso-scale simulation data generated from representative elementary volume (RVE) of heterogeneous materials with internal structures. The neural kernel plasticity model and other alternative machine learning approaches are compared in a computational homogenization problem for layered geomaterials. The results indicate that the neural kernel feature space may lead to more robust forward predictions against sparse and high-dimensional data. 

This paper presents a graph-manifold iterative algorithm to predict the configurations of geometrically exact shells subjected to external loading. The finite element solutions are first stored in a weighted graph where each graph node stores the nodal displacement and nodal director. This collection of solutions is embedded onto a low-dimensional latent space through a graph isomorphism encoder. This graph embedding step reduces the dimensionality of the nonlinear data and makes it easier for the response surface to be constructed. The decoder, in return, converts an element in the latent space back to a weighted graph that represents a finite element solution. As such, the deformed configuration of the shell can be obtained by decoding the predictions in the latent space without running extra finite element simulations. For engineering applications where the shell is often subjected to concentrated loads or a local portion of the shell structure is of particular interest, we use the solutions stored in a graph to reconstruct a smooth manifold where the balance laws are enforced to control the curvature of the shell. The resultant computer algorithm enjoys both the speed of the nonlinear dimensional reduced solver and the fidelity of the solutions at locations where it matters. 

We introduce a denoising diffusion algorithm to discover microstructures with nonlinear fine-tuned properties. Denoising diffusion probabilistic models are generative models that use diffusion-based dynamics to gradually denoise images and generate realistic synthetic samples. By learning the reverse of a Markov diffusion process, we design an artificial intelligence to efficiently manipulate the topology of microstructures to generate a massive number of prototypes that exhibit constitutive responses sufficiently close to designated nonlinear constitutive behaviors. To identify the subset of microcstructures with sufficiently precise fine-tuned properties, a convolutional neural network surrogate is trained to replace high-fidelity finite element simulations to filter out prototypes outside the admissible range. Results of this study indicate that the denoising diffusion process is capable of creating microstructures of fine-tuned nonlinear material properties within the latent space of the training data. More importantly, this denoising diffusion algorithm can be easily extended to incorporate additional topological and geometric modifications by introducing high-dimensional structures embedded in the latent space. Numerical experiments are conducted on the open-source mechanical MNIST data set (Lejeune, 2020). Consequently, this algorithm is not only capable of performing inverse design of nonlinear effective media, but also learns the nonlinear structure–property map to quantitatively understand the multiscale interplay among the geometry, topology, and their effective macroscopic properties. 

This paper introduces a publicly available PyTorch-ABAQUS deep-learning framework of a family of plasticity models where the yield surface is implicitly represented by a scalar-valued function. In particular, our focus is to introduce a practical framework that can be deployed for engineering analysis that employs a user-defined material subroutine (UMAT/VUMAT) for ABAQUS, which is written in FORTRAN. To accomplish this task while leveraging the back-propagation learning algorithm to speed up the neural-network training, we introduce an interface code where the weights and biases of the trained neural networks obtained via the PyTorch library can be automatically converted into a generic FORTRAN code that can be a part of the UMAT/VUMAT algorithm. To enable third-party validation, we purposely make all the data sets, source code used to train the neural-network-based constitutive models, and the trained models available in a public repository. Furthermore, the practicality of the workflow is then further tested on a dataset for anisotropic yield function to showcase the extensibility of the proposed framework. A number of representative numerical experiments are used to examine the accuracy, robustness and reproducibility of the results generated by the neural network models. 

Abstract Shock waves in geological materials are characterized by a sudden release of rapidly expanding gas, liquid, and solid particles. These shock waves may occur due to explosive volcanic eruptions or be artificially triggered. In fact, underground explosions have often been used as an engineering solution for large‐scale excavation, stimulating oil and gas recovery, creating cavities for underground waste storage, and even extinguishing gas field fires. As such, hydrocodes capable of simulating the rapid and significant deformation under extreme conditions can be a valuable tool for ensuring the safety of the explosions. Nevertheless, as most of the hydrocodes are often formulated in an Eulerian grid, this setting makes it non‐trivial to track the deformation configuration of the materials without a level set. The objective of this paper is to propose the use of the material point method equipped with appropriate equation of state (EOS) models as a hydrocode suitable to simulate underground explosions of transverse isotropic geomaterials. To capture the anisotropic effect of the common layered soil deposits, we introduce a new MPM hydrocode where an anisotropic version of the Mie‐Gruneisen EOS is coupled with a frictional Drucker‐Prager plasticity model to replicate the high‐strain‐rate constitutive responses of soil. By leveraging the Lagrangian nature of material points to capture the historical dependence and the Eulerian calculation of internal force, the resultant model is capable of simulating the rapid evolution of geometry of the soil as well as the high‐strain‐rate soil mechanics of anisotropic materials. 

This article introduces an isometric manifold embedding data-driven paradigm designed to enable model-free simulations with noisy data sampled from a constitutive manifold. The proposed data-driven approach iterates between a global optimization problem that seeks admissible solutions for the balance principle and a local optimization problem that finds the closest point projection of the Euclidean space that isometrically embeds a nonlinear constitutive manifold. To de-noise the database, a geometric autoencoder is introduced such that the encoder first learns to create an approximated embedding that maps the underlying low-dimensional structure of the high-dimensional constitutive manifold onto a flattened manifold with less curvature. We then obtain the noise-free constitutive responses by projecting data onto a denoised latent space that is completely flat by assuming that the noise and the underlying constitutive signal are orthogonal to each other. Consequently, a projection from the conservative manifold onto this de-noised constitutive latent space enables us to complete the local optimization step of the data-driven paradigm. Finally, to decode the data expressed in the latent space without reintroducing noise, we impose a set of isometry constraints while training the autoencoder such that the nonlinear mapping from the latent space to the reconstructed constituent manifold is distance-preserving. Numerical examples are used to both validate the implementation and demonstrate the accuracy, robustness, and limitations of the proposed paradigm.