Prediction of composite microstructure stress-strain curves using convolutional neural networks

Stress-strain curves are an important representation of a material's mechanical properties, from which important properties such as elastic modulus, strength, and toughness, are defined. However, generating stress-strain curves from numerical methods such as finite element method (FEM) is computationally intensive, especially when considering the entire failure path for a material. As a result, it is difficult to perform high throughput computational design of materials with large design spaces, especially when considering mechanical responses beyond the elastic limit. In this work, a combination of principal component analysis (PCA) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) are used to predict the entire stress-strain behavior of binary composites evaluated over the entire failure path, motivated by the significantly faster inference speed of empirical models. We show that PCA transforms the stress-strain curves into an effective latent space by visualizing the eigenbasis of PCA. Despite having a dataset of only 10-27% of possible microstructure configurations, the mean absolute error of the prediction is <10% of the range of values in the dataset, when measuring model performance based on derived material descriptors, such as modulus, strength, and toughness. Our study demonstrates the potential to use machine learning to accelerate material design, characterization, and optimization.