Neural network scaling and generalization for 3D strain fields in heterogeneous materials
Lucas Fourel, Paul Devianne, Marine Debouvry, Tristan Destruhaut, Russell Gunn, Ashwini Gupta, Lori Graham-Brady, Jean-François Molinari
原文摘要
Computational homogenization and coupled multiscale simulations of heterogeneous materials require repeated solution of mechanical fields on Representative Volume Elements, which becomes prohibitively expensive for high-resolution three-dimensional microstructures. Machine-learning surrogates can accelerate these computations, yet most existing approaches predict fields for fixed macroscopic loadings and provide limited guidance on how to scale network architectures for high-resolution 3D tensor-field prediction. This work presents a U-Net surrogate trained to predict the full 36-component strain localization tensor field in voxelized concrete mesostructures at resolutions up to $256^3$. Training localization tensors are generated with an FFT-based linear elastic solver, and an extensive hyperparameter optimization is performed to derive scaling rules and an accuracy-speed trade-off analysis. The results show that only network width and depth need to be scaled with problem complexity, while several conventional U-Net design choices, such as doubling channels after downsampling, are suboptimal for this problem. The final neural network achieves a Mean Absolute Error of 1.118% on both the validation and the held-out test sets, and an inference speedup of approximately 8.7x over the FFT-based solver on an Nvidia H100 GPU. Generalization experiments reveal transfer across aggregate volume fractions and highlight the importance of training on diverse morphologies. To safeguard reliability, a Maximum Mean Discrepancy metric computed on internal feature maps is proposed for detecting out-of-distribution microstructures without costly reference computations.
physics.comp-ph · cs.CE