Application of artificial neural networks for the prediction of interface mechanics: a study on grain boundary constitutive behavior

The present work aims at the identification of the effective constitutive behavior of Σ 5 aluminum grain boundaries (GB) for proportional loading by using machine learning (ML) techniques. The input for the ML approach is high accuracy data gathered in challenging molecular dynamics (MD) simulations at the atomic scale for varying temperatures and loading conditions. The effective traction-separation relation is recorded during the MD simulations. The raw MD data then serves for the training of an artificial neural network (ANN) as a surrogate model of the constitutive behavior at the grain boundary. Despite the extremely fluctuating nature of the MD data and its inhomogeneous distribution in the traction-separation space, the ANN surrogate trained on the raw MD data shows a very good agreement in the average behavior without any data-smoothing or pre-processing. Further, it is shown that the trained traction-separation ANN captures important physical properties and is able to predict traction values for given separations not contained in the training data. For example, MD simulations show a transition in traction-separation behaviour from pure sliding mode under shear load to combined GB sliding and decohesion with intermediate hardening regime at mixed load directions. These changes in GB behaviour are fully captured in the ANN predictions. Furthermore, by construction, the ANN surrogate is differentiable for arbitrary separation and also temperature, such that a thermo-mechanical tangent stiffness operator can always be evaluated. The trained ANN can then serve for large-scale FE simulation as an alternative to direct MD-FE coupling which is often infeasible in practical applications. © 2020, The Author(s).