Mechanistic data-driven prediction of as-built mechanical properties in metal additive manufacturing

• Published in: npj computational materials Vol. 7; no. 1; pp. 1 - 12
• Main Authors: Xie, Xiaoyu, Bennett, Jennifer, Saha, Sourav, Lu, Ye, Cao, Jian, Liu, Wing Kam, Gan, Zhengtao
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 08.06.2021; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 639/301/1023/1026; 639/301/1034/1037; Additive manufacturing; Artificial neural networks; Characterization and Evaluation of Materials; Chemistry and Materials Science; Computational Intelligence; Critical temperature; Deep learning; Heterogeneity; Learning algorithms; Machine learning; Materials Science; Mathematical and Computational Engineering; Mathematical and Computational Physics; Mathematical Modeling and Industrial Mathematics; Mechanical properties; Multiresolution analysis; Neural networks; Spatial variations; Theoretical; Wavelet transforms
• DOI: 10.1038/s41524-021-00555-z
• ISSN: 2057-3960

Metal additive manufacturing provides remarkable flexibility in geometry and component design, but localized heating/cooling heterogeneity leads to spatial variations of as-built mechanical properties, significantly complicating the materials design process. To this end, we develop a mechanistic data-driven framework integrating wavelet transforms and convolutional neural networks to predict location-dependent mechanical properties over fabricated parts based on process-induced temperature sequences, i.e., thermal histories. The framework enables multiresolution analysis and importance analysis to reveal dominant mechanistic features underlying the additive manufacturing process, such as critical temperature ranges and fundamental thermal frequencies. We systematically compare the developed approach with other machine learning methods. The results demonstrate that the developed approach achieves reasonably good predictive capability using a small amount of noisy experimental data. It provides a concrete foundation for a revolutionary methodology that predicts spatial and temporal evolution of mechanical properties leveraging domain-specific knowledge and cutting-edge machine and deep learning technologies.