Prediction of the evolution of the stress field of polycrystals undergoing elastic-plastic deformation with a hybrid neural network model

Abstract

Crystal plasticity theory is often employed to predict the mesoscopic states of polycrystalline metals, and is well-known to be costly to simulate. Using a neural network with convolutional layers encoding correlations in time and space, we were able to predict the evolution of the dominant component of the stress field given only the initial microstructure and external loading. In comparison to our recent work, we were able to predict not only the spatial average of the stress response but the evolution of the field itself. We show that the stress fields and their rates are in good agreement with the two dimensional crystal plasticity data and have no visible artifacts. Furthermore the distribution of stress throughout the elastic to fully plastic transition match the truth provided by held out crystal plasticity data. Lastly we demonstrate the efficacy of the trained model in material characterization and optimization tasks.