Surrogate modeling of stress fields in periodic polycrystalline microstructures using U-Net and Fourier neural operators

Sarthak Kapoor, Jaber Mianroodi, Bob Svendsen, Mohammad Khorrami, Nima H. Siboni

Keywords: U-Net, Fourier neural operator, micro-mechanics, surrogate modeling

TL;DR: The paper compares two design choices to implement U-Net and FNO for surrogate modeling of stress fields in material microstructures. It also discusses a key qualitative difference between stress field predictions from the two networks.

Abstract: In this work, we implement and compare two artificial neural networks (ANNs) $\textemdash$ U-Net and Fourier neural operators (FNO) $\textemdash$ for surrogate modeling of stress fields in periodic polycrystalline microstructures. Both ANNs were trained on results from the numerical solution of the boundary-value problem for quasi-static mechanical equilibrium in grain microstructures under uniaxial tensile loading. More specifically, they learned mappings from the spatial fields of material properties to the equilibrium stress fields. To generate multiple output fields, one for every stress component, the networks were branched internally into parallel sub-networks at different stages, which were then trained together. We compare various such adaptations to find the best one. For the U-Net-based approach, we show that convolution with periodic padding instead of zero padding gives better accuracy along the system boundaries. We further compare the predictions from the two approaches: the FNO-based approach is more accurate than its U-Net-based counterpart; the normalized mean absolute error incurred on the predicted stress field with respect to the numerical solution is $3.5-7.5$ times lower for the former than the latter. In comparison to the U-Net-based approach, the errors in the FNO-based approach are restricted to grain boundaries leading to narrower error distribution.