Predicting Stress in Two-phase Random Materials and Super-Resolution Method for Stress Images by Embedding Physical Information

Abstract

Stress analysis is an important part of material design. For materials with complex microstructures, such as two-phase random materials (TRMs), material failure is often accompanied by stress concentration. Phase interfaces in two-phase materials are critical for stress concentration. Therefore, the prediction error of stress at phase boundaries is crucial. In practical engineering, the pixels of the obtained material microstructure images are limited, which limits the resolution of stress images generated by deep learning methods, making it difficult to observe stress concentration regions. Existing Image Super-Resolution (ISR) technologies are all based on data-driven supervised learning. However, stress images have natural physical constraints, which provide new ideas for new ISR technologies. In this study, we constructed a stress prediction framework for TRMs. First, the framework uses a proposed Multiple Compositions U-net (MC U-net) to predict stress in low-resolution material microstructures. By considering the phase interface information of the microstructure, the MC U-net effectively reduces the problem of excessive prediction errors at phase boundaries. Secondly, a Mixed Physics-Informed Neural Network (MPINN) based method for stress ISR (SRPINN) was proposed. By introducing the constraints of physical information, the new method does not require paired stress images for training and can increase the resolution of stress images to any multiple. This enables a multiscale analysis of the stress concentration regions at phase boundaries. Finally, we performed stress analysis on TRMs with different phase volume fractions and loading states through transfer learning. The results show the proposed stress prediction framework has satisfactory accuracy and generalization ability.