No Arabic abstract
Data-driven design of mechanical metamaterials is an increasingly popular method to combat costly physical simulations and immense, often intractable, geometrical design spaces. Using a precomputed dataset of unit cells, a multiscale structure can be quickly filled via combinatorial search algorithms, and machine learning models can be trained to accelerate the process. However, the dependence on data induces a unique challenge: An imbalanced dataset containing more of certain shapes or physical properties can be detrimental to the efficacy of data-driven approaches. In answer, we posit that a smaller yet diverse set of unit cells leads to scalable search and unbiased learning. To select such subsets, we propose METASET, a methodology that 1) uses similarity metrics and positive semi-definite kernels to jointly measure the closeness of unit cells in both shape and property spaces, and 2) incorporates Determinantal Point Processes for efficient subset selection. Moreover, METASET allows the trade-off between shape and property diversity so that subsets can be tuned for various applications. Through the design of 2D metamaterials with target displacement profiles, we demonstrate that smaller, diverse subsets can indeed improve the search process as well as structural performance. By eliminating inherent overlaps in a dataset of 3D unit cells created with symmetry rules, we also illustrate that our flexible method can distill unique subsets regardless of the metric employed. Our diverse subsets are provided publicly for use by any designer.
An innovative physics-guided learning algorithm for predicting the mechanical response of materials and structures is proposed in this paper. The key concept of the proposed study is based on the fact that physics models are governed by Partial Differential Equation (PDE), and its loading/ response mapping can be solved using Finite Element Analysis (FEA). Based on this, a special type of deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) is proposed that takes advantage of our prior knowledge in physics to build data-driven models whose architectures are of physics meaning. This type of network is named as FEA-Net and is used to solve the mechanical response under external loading. Thus, the identification of a mechanical system parameters and the computation of its responses are treated as the learning and inference of FEA-Net, respectively. Case studies on multi-physics (e.g., coupled mechanical-thermal analysis) and multi-phase problems (e.g., composite materials with random micro-structures) are used to demonstrate and verify the theoretical and computational advantages of the proposed method.
In chemical process engineering, surrogate models of complex systems are often necessary for tasks of domain exploration, sensitivity analysis of the design parameters, and optimization. A suite of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations geared toward chemical process equipment modeling has been developed and validated with experimental results from the literature. Various regression-based active learning strategies are explored with these CFD simulators in-the-loop under the constraints of a limited function evaluation budget. Specifically, five different sampling strategies and five regression techniques are compared, considering a set of four test cases of industrial significance and varying complexity. Gaussian process regression was observed to have a consistently good performance for these applications. The present quantitative study outlines the pros and cons of the different available techniques and highlights the best practices for their adoption. The test cases and tools are available with an open-source license to ensure reproducibility and engage the wider research community in contributing to both the CFD models and developing and benchmarking new improved algorithms tailored to this field.
Despite the common usage of a canonical, data-independent, hemodynamic response function (HRF), it is known that the shape of the HRF varies across brain regions and subjects. This suggests that a data-driven estimation of this function could lead to more statistical power when modeling BOLD fMRI data. However, unconstrained estimation of the HRF can yield highly unstable results when the number of free parameters is large. We develop a method for the joint estimation of activation and HRF using a rank constraint causing the estimated HRF to be equal across events/conditions, yet permitting it to be different across voxels. Model estimation leads to an optimization problem that we propose to solve with an efficient quasi-Newton method exploiting fast gradient computations. This model, called GLM with Rank-1 constraint (R1-GLM), can be extended to the setting of GLM with separate designs which has been shown to improve decoding accuracy in brain activity decoding experiments. We compare 10 different HRF modeling methods in terms of encoding and decoding score in two different datasets. Our results show that the R1-GLM model significantly outperforms competing methods in both encoding and decoding settings, positioning it as an attractive method both from the points of view of accuracy and computational efficiency.
Machine learning (ML) is shown to predict new alloys and their performances in a high dimensional, multiple-target-property design space that considers chemistry, multi-step processing routes, and characterization methodology variations. A physics-informed featured engineering approach is shown to enable otherwise poorly performing ML models to perform well with the same data. Specifically, previously engineered elemental features based on alloy chemistries are combined with newly engineered heat treatment process features. The new features result from first transforming the heat treatment parameter data as it was previously recorded using nonlinear mathematical relationships known to describe the thermodynamics and kinetics of phase transformations in alloys. The ability of the ML model to be used for predictive design is validated using blind predictions. Composition - process - property relationships for thermal hysteresis of shape memory alloys (SMAs) with complex microstructures created via multiple melting-homogenization-solutionization-precipitation processing stage variations are captured, in addition to the mean transformation temperatures of the SMAs. The quantitative models of hysteresis exhibited by such highly processed alloys demonstrate the ability for ML models to design for physical complexities that have challenged physics-based modeling approaches for decades.
Metamaterials are emerging as a new paradigmatic material system to render unprecedented and tailorable properties for a wide variety of engineering applications. However, the inverse design of metamaterial and its multiscale system is challenging due to high-dimensional topological design space, multiple local optima, and high computational cost. To address these hurdles, we propose a novel data-driven metamaterial design framework based on deep generative modeling. A variational autoencoder (VAE) and a regressor for property prediction are simultaneously trained on a large metamaterial database to map complex microstructures into a low-dimensional, continuous, and organized latent space. We show in this study that the latent space of VAE provides a distance metric to measure shape similarity, enable interpolation between microstructures and encode meaningful patterns of variation in geometries and properties. Based on these insights, systematic data-driven methods are proposed for the design of microstructure, graded family, and multiscale system. For microstructure design, the tuning of mechanical properties and complex manipulations of microstructures are easily achieved by simple vector operations in the latent space. The vector operation is further extended to generate metamaterial families with a controlled gradation of mechanical properties by searching on a constructed graph model. For multiscale metamaterial systems design, a diverse set of microstructures can be rapidly generated using VAE for target properties at different locations and then assembled by an efficient graph-based optimization method to ensure compatibility between adjacent microstructures. We demonstrate our framework by designing both functionally graded and heterogeneous metamaterial systems that achieve desired distortion behaviors.