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Predictive simulations of the shock‐to‐detonation transition (SDT) in heterogeneous energetic materials (EM) are vital to the design and control of their energy release and sensitivity. Due to the complexity of the thermo‐mechanics of EM during the SDT, both macro‐scale response and sub‐grid mesoscale energy localization must be captured accurately. This work proposes an efficient and accurate multiscale framework for SDT simulations of EM. We introduce a new approach for SDT simulation by using deep learning to model the mesoscale energy localization of shock‐initiated EM microstructures. The proposed multiscale modeling framework is divided into two stages. First, a physics‐aware recurrent convolutional neural network (PARC) is used to model the mesoscale energy localization of shock‐initiated heterogeneous EM microstructures. PARC is trained using direct numerical simulations (DNS) of hotspot ignition and growth within microstructures of pressed HMX material subjected to different input shock strengths. After training, PARC is employed to supply hotspot ignition and growth rates for macroscale SDT simulations. We show that PARC can play the role of a surrogate model in a multiscale simulation framework, while drastically reducing the computation cost and providing improved representations of the sub‐grid physics. The proposed multiscale modeling approach will provide a new tool for material scientists in designing high‐performance and safer energetic materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly emerging as a enabling tool for solving complex materials design problems. This paper aims to review recent advances in AI‐driven materials‐by‐design and their applications to energetic materials (EM). Trained with data from numerical simulations and/or physical experiments, AI models can assimilate trends and patterns within the design parameter space, identify optimal material designs (micro‐morphologies, combinations of materials in composites, etc.), and point to designs with superior/targeted property and performance metrics. We review approaches focusing on such capabilities with respect to the three main stages of materials‐by‐design, namely representation learning of microstructure morphology (i. e., shape descriptors), structure‐property‐performance (S−P−P) linkage estimation, and optimization/design exploration. We leave out "process" as much work remains to be done to establish the connectivity between process and structure. We provide a perspective view of these methods in terms of their potential, practicality, and efficacy towards the realization of materials‐by‐design. Specifically, methods in the literature are evaluated in terms of their capacity to learn from a small/limited number of data, computational complexity, generalizability/scalability to other material species and operating conditions, interpretability of the model predictions, and the burden of supervision/data annotation. Finally, we suggest a few promising future research directions for EM materials‐by‐design, such as meta‐learning, active learning, Bayesian learning, and semi‐/weakly‐supervised learning, to bridge the gap between machine learning research and EM research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For material modeling and discovery, synthetic microstructures play a critical role as digital twins. They provide stochastic samples upon which direct numerical simulations can be conducted to populate material databases. A large ensemble of simulation data on synthetic microstructures may provide supplemental data to inform and refine macroscopic material models, which might not be feasible from physical experiments alone. However, synthesizing realistic microstructures with realistic microstructural attributes is highly challenging. Thus, it is often oversimplified via rough approximations that may yield an inaccurate representation of the physical world. Here, we propose a novel deep learning method that can synthesize realistic three-dimensional microstructures with controlled structural properties using the combination of generative adversarial networks (GAN) and actor-critic (AC) reinforcement learning. The GAN-AC combination enables the generation of microstructures that not only resemble the appearances of real specimens but also yield user-defined physical quantities of interest (QoI). Our validation experiments confirm that the properties of synthetic microstructures generated by the GAN-AC framework are within a 5% error margin with respect to the target values. The scientific contribution of this paper resides in the novel design of the GAN-AC microstructure generator and the mathematical and algorithmic foundations therein. The proposed method will have a broad and substantive impact on the materials community by providing lenses for analyzing structure-property-performance linkages and for implementing the notion of 'materials-by-design'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sensitivity of heterogeneous energetic (HE) materials (propellants, explosives, and pyrotechnics) is critically dependent on their microstructure. Initiation of chemical reactions occurs at hot spots due to energy localization at sites of porosities and other defects. Emerging multi-scale predictive models of HE response to loads account for the physics at the meso-scale, i.e. at the scale of statistically representative clusters of particles and other features in the microstructure. Meso-scale physics is infused in machine-learned closure models informed by resolved meso-scale simulations. Since microstructures are stochastic, ensembles of meso-scale simulations are required to quantify hot spot ignition and growth and to develop models for microstructure-dependent energy deposition rates. We propose utilizing generative adversarial networks (GAN) to spawn ensembles of synthetic heterogeneous energetic material microstructures. The method generates qualitatively and quantitatively realistic microstructures by learning from images of HE microstructures. We show that the proposed GAN method also permits the generation of new morphologies, where the porosity distribution can be controlled and spatially manipulated. Such control paves the way for the design of novel microstructures to engineer HE materials for targeted performance in a materials-by-design framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]