Process-fracture mapping of a DLP-printed photopolymer using Bayesian active learning and surrogate-based sensitivity analysis

Abstract

Digital light processing (DLP) enables rapid fabrication of polymer structures, but fracture performance depends on multiple interacting processing variables, making exhaustive experimental characterization impractical. This work presents a data-efficient framework for process-fracture mapping of a DLP-printed photopolymer using Bayesian active learning and digital image correlation (DIC)-assisted Mode I fracture experiments. Four processing parameters were considered: layer angle, UV exposure time, layer height, and print temperature. Fracture resistance was quantified by the critical J-integral, $J_c$, obtained from three-point-bending tests with DIC-based evaluation of crack-mouth opening displacement and hinge-point kinematics. Beginning with two randomly selected conditions, Gaussian process regression (GPR) and a modified upper confidence bound (UCB)-style acquisition function selected 26 additional experiments, yielding 28 processing conditions with three replicates each. The final GPR surrogate reproduced the training data with $R^2=0.99$ and achieved leave-one-out cross-validation performance of $R^2=0.63$ and Pearson $r=0.81$. Surrogate-based sensitivity analysis quantified parameter effects and global contributions. One-at-a-time response curves revealed nonlinear conditional trends, while global Sobol analysis identified UV exposure time as the dominant processing variable, with first-order and total-order indices of 0.6780 and 0.7581, respectively. Based on total-order influence, the parameters ranked as UV exposure time, layer angle, print temperature, and layer height. The first-order Sobol indices summed to 0.8058, indicating non-negligible interaction and higher-order effects. These results demonstrate that Bayesian-active-learning-guided experimentation can efficiently recover process-fracture relationships and parameter interactions from a sparse experimental campaign.