Physics-embedded graph network for accelerating phase-field simulation of microstructure evolution in additive manufacturing
Abstract
The phase-field (PF) method is a physics-based computational approach for simulating interfacial morphology. It has been used to model powder melting, rapid solidification, and grain structure evolution in metal additive manufacturing (AM). However, traditional direct numerical simulation (DNS) of the PF method is computationally expensive due to sufficiently small mesh size. Here, a physics-embedded graph network (PEGN) is proposed to leverage an elegant graph representation of the grain structure and embed the classic PF theory into the graph network. By reformulating the classic PF problem as an unsupervised machine learning task on a graph network, PEGN efficiently solves temperature field, liquid/solid phase fraction, and grain orientation variables to minimize a physics-based loss/energy function. The approach is at least 50 times faster than DNS in both CPU and GPU implementation while still capturing key physical features. Hence, PEGN allows to simulate large-scale multi-layer and multi-track AM build effectively.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Sep 21, 2022
- Source ID
- 10.1038/s41524-022-00890-9
Entities
People
- Jian Cao
- Shuheng Liao
- Tianju Xue
- Zhengtao Gan
Organizations
- National Institute of Standards and Technology
- National Science Foundation
- United States Department of Defense