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The design of alloys for use in gas turbine engine blades is a complex task that involves balancing multiple objectives and constraints. Candidate alloys must be ductile at room temperature and retain their yield strength at high temperatures, as well as possess low density, high thermal conductivity, narrow solidification range, high solidus temperature, and a small linear thermal expansion coefficient. Traditional Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) methods are not sufficient for exploring combinatorially-vast alloy design spaces, optimizing for multiple objectives, nor ensuring that multiple constraints are met. In this work, we propose an approach for solving a constrained multi-objective materials design problem over a large composition space, specifically focusing on the Mo-Nb-Ti-V-W system as a representative Multi-Principal Element Alloy (MPEA) for potential use in next-generation gas turbine blades. Our approach is able to learn and adapt to unknown constraints in the design space, making decisions about the best course of action at each stage of the process. As a result, we identify 21 Pareto-optimal alloys that satisfy all constraints. Our proposed framework is significantly more efficient and faster than a brute force approach.

 

Bayesian optimization (BO) is an indispensable tool to optimize objective functions that either do not have known functional forms or are expensive to evaluate. Currently, optimal experimental design is always conducted within the workflow of BO leading to more efficient exploration of the design space compared to traditional strategies. This can have a significant impact on modern scientific discovery, in particular autonomous materials discovery, which can be viewed as an optimization problem aimed at looking for the maximum (or minimum) point for the desired materials properties. The performance of BO-based experimental design depends not only on the adopted acquisition function but also on the surrogate models that help to approximate underlying objective functions. In this paper, we propose a fully autonomous experimental design framework that uses more adaptive and flexible Bayesian surrogate models in a BO procedure, namely Bayesian multivariate adaptive regression splines and Bayesian additive regression trees. They can overcome the weaknesses of widely used Gaussian process-based methods when faced with relatively high-dimensional design space or non-smooth patterns of objective functions. Both simulation studies and real-world materials science case studies demonstrate their enhanced search efficiency and robustness.

 

Thanks to the rapid advances in artificial intelligence, AI for science (AI4Science) has emerged as one of the new promising research directions for modern science and engineering. In this review, we focus on recent efforts to develop knowledge-driven Bayesian learning and experimental design methods for accelerating the discovery of novel functional materials as well as enhancing the understanding of composition-process-structure-property relationships. We specifically discuss the challenges and opportunities in integrating prior scientific knowledge and physics principles with AI and machine learning (ML) models for accelerating materials and knowledge discovery. The current state-of-the-art methods in knowledge-based prior construction, model fusion, uncertainty quantification, optimal experimental design, and symbolic regression are detailed in the review, along with several detailed case studies and results in materials discovery. 

We consider the prediction of the Hamiltonian matrix, which finds use in quantum chemistry and condensed matter physics. Efficiency and equivariance are two important, but conflicting factors. In this work, we propose a SE(3)-equivariant network, named QHNet, that achieves efficiency and equivariance. Our key advance lies at the innovative design of QHNet architecture, which not only obeys the underlying symmetries, but also enables the reduction of number of tensor products by 92%. In addition, QHNet prevents the exponential growth of channel dimension when more atom types are involved. We perform experiments on MD17 datasets, including four molecular systems. Experimental results show that our QHNet can achieve comparable performance to the state of the art methods at a significantly faster speed. Besides, our QHNet consumes 50% less memory due to its streamlined architecture. Our code is publicly available as part of the AIRS library (https://github.com/divelab/AIRS).