Search

Soft biological tissues exhibit a tendency to maintain a preferred state of tensile stress, known as tensional homeostasis, which is restored even after external mechanical stimuli. This macroscopic behavior can be described using the theory of kinematic growth, where the deformation gradient is multiplicatively decomposed into an elastic part and a part related to growth and remodeling. Recently, the concept of homeostatic surfaces was introduced to define the state of homeostasis and the evolution equations for inelastic deformations. However, identifying the optimal model and material parameters to accurately capture the macroscopic behavior of inelastic materials can only be accomplished with significant expertise, is often time-consuming, and prone to error, regardless of the specific inelastic phenomenon. To address this challenge, built-in physics machine learning algorithms offer significant potential. In this work, we extend our inelastic Constitutive Artificial Neural Networks (iCANNs) by incorporating kinematic growth and homeostatic surfaces to discover the scalar model equations, namely the Helmholtz free energy and the pseudo potential. The latter describes the state of homeostasis in a smeared sense. We evaluate the ability of the proposed network to learn from experimentally obtained tissue equivalent data at the material point level, assess its predictive accuracy beyond the training regime, and discuss its current limitations when applied at the structural level. Our source code, data, examples, and an implementation of the corresponding material subroutine are made accessible to the public at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13946282., Comment: 46 pages, 12 figures, 5 tables

The revolutionary advancements in metal additive manufacturing have enabled the production of alloy-based lattice structures with complex geometrical features and high resolutions. This has encouraged the development of nonlinear material models, including plasticity, damage, etc., for such materials. However, the prohibitive computational cost arising from the high number of degrees of freedom for engineering structures composed of lattice structures highlights the necessity of homogenization techniques, such as the two-scale computational homogenization method. In the present work, a two-scale homogenization approach with on-the-fly exchange of information is adopted to study the elastoplastic behavior of truss-based lattice structures. The macroscopic homogenized structure is represented by a two-dimensional continuum, while the underlying microscale lattices are modeled as a network of one-dimensional truss elements. This helps to significantly reduce the associated computational cost by reducing the microscopic degrees of freedom. The microscale trusses are assumed to exhibit an elastoplastic material behavior characterized by a combination of nonlinear exponential isotropic hardening and linear kinematic hardening. Through multiple numerical examples, the performance of the adopted homogenization approach is examined by comparing forces and displacements with direct numerical simulations of discrete structures for three types of stretching-dominated lattice topologies, including triangular, X-braced and X-Plus-braced unit cells. Furthermore, the principle of scale separation, which emphasizes the need for an adequate separation between the macroscopic and microscopic characteristic lengths, is investigated.

Auxetic structures, known for their negative Poisson's ratio, exhibit effective elastic properties heavily influenced by their underlying structural geometry and base material properties. While periodic homogenization of auxetic unit cells can be used to investigate these properties, it is computationally expensive and limits design space exploration and inverse analysis. In this paper, surrogate models are developed for the real-time prediction of the effective elastic properties of auxetic unit cells with orthogonal voids of different shapes. The unit cells feature orthogonal voids in four distinct shapes, including rectangular, diamond, oval, and peanut-shaped voids, each characterized by specific void diameters. The generated surrogate models accept geometric parameters and the elastic properties of the base material as inputs to predict the effective elastic constants in real-time. This rapid evaluation enables a practical inverse analysis framework for obtaining the optimal design parameters that yield the desired effective response. The fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based homogenization approach is adopted to efficiently generate data for developing the surrogate models, bypassing concerns about periodic mesh generation and boundary conditions typically associated with the finite element method (FEM). The performance of the generated surrogate models is rigorously examined through a train/test split methodology, a parametric study, and an inverse problem. Finally, a graphical user interface (GUI) is developed, offering real-time prediction of the effective tangent stiffness and performing inverse analysis to determine optimal geometric parameters.

This paper establishes a universal framework for the nonlocal modeling of anisotropic damage at finite strains. By the combination of two recent works, the new framework allows for the flexible incorporation of different established hyperelastic finite strain material formulations into anisotropic damage whilst ensuring mesh-independent results by employing a generic set of micromorphic gradient-extensions. First, the anisotropic damage model, generally satisfying the damage growth criterion, is investigated for the specific choice of a Neo-Hookean material on a single element. Next, the model is applied with different gradient-extensions in structural simulations of an asymmetrically notched specimen to identify an efficient choice in the form of a volumetric-deviatoric regularization. Thereafter, the universal framework, which is without loss of generality here specified for a Neo-Hookean material with a volumetric-deviatoric gradient-extension, successfully serves for the complex simulation of a pressure loaded rotor blade. After acceptance of the manuscript, we make the codes of the material subroutines accessible to the public at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11171630.

In this work, we present a model order reduction technique for nonlinear structures assembled from components.The reduced order model is constructed by reducing the substructures with proper orthogonal decomposition and connecting them by a mortar-tied contact formulation. The snapshots for the substructure projection matrices are computed on the substructure level by the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) method. The snapshots are computed using a random sampling procedure based on a parametrization of boundary conditions. To reduce the computational effort of the snapshot computation full-order simulations of the substructures are only computed when the error of the reduced solution is above a threshold. In numerical examples, we show the accuracy and efficiency of the method for nonlinear problems involving material and geometric nonlinearity as well as non-matching meshes. We are able to predict solutions of systems that we did not compute in our snapshots.

Numerical simulations are crucial for comprehending how engineering structures behave under extreme conditions, particularly when dealing with thermo-mechanically coupled issues compounded by damage-induced material softening. However, such simulations often entail substantial computational expenses. To mitigate this, the focus has shifted towards employing model order reduction (MOR) techniques, which hold promise for accelerating computations. Yet, applying MOR to highly nonlinear, multi-physical problems influenced by material softening remains a relatively new area of research, with numerous unanswered questions. Addressing this gap, this study proposes and investigates a novel multi-field decomposed MOR technique, rooted in a snapshot-based Proper Orthogonal Decomposition-Galerkin (POD-G) projection approach. Utilizing a recently developed thermo-mechanically coupled gradient-extended damage-plasticity model as a case study, this work demonstrates that splitting snapshot vectors into distinct physical fields (displacements, damage, temperature) and projecting them onto separate lower-dimensional subspaces can yield more precise and stable outcomes compared to conventional methods. Through a series of numerical benchmark tests, our multi-field decomposed MOR technique demonstrates its capacity to significantly reduce computational expenses in simulations involving severe damage, while maintaining a high level of accuracy.

We propose a novel finite element-based physics-informed operator learning framework that allows for predicting spatiotemporal dynamics governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). The proposed framework employs a loss function inspired by the finite element method (FEM) with the implicit Euler time integration scheme. A transient thermal conduction problem is considered to benchmark the performance. The proposed operator learning framework takes a temperature field at the current time step as input and predicts a temperature field at the next time step. The Galerkin discretized weak formulation of the heat equation is employed to incorporate physics into the loss function, which is coined finite operator learning (FOL). Upon training, the networks successfully predict the temperature evolution over time for any initial temperature field at high accuracy compared to the FEM solution. The framework is also confirmed to be applicable to a heterogeneous thermal conductivity and arbitrary geometry. The advantages of FOL can be summarized as follows: First, the training is performed in an unsupervised manner, avoiding the need for a large data set prepared from costly simulations or experiments. Instead, random temperature patterns generated by the Gaussian random process and the Fourier series, combined with constant temperature fields, are used as training data to cover possible temperature cases. Second, shape functions and backward difference approximation are exploited for the domain discretization, resulting in a purely algebraic equation. This enhances training efficiency, as one avoids time-consuming automatic differentiation when optimizing weights and biases while accepting possible discretization errors. Finally, thanks to the interpolation power of FEM, any arbitrary geometry can be handled with FOL, which is crucial to addressing various engineering application scenarios.

Modern inelastic material model formulations rely on the use of tensor-valued internal variables. When inelastic phenomena include softening, simulations of the former are prone to localization. Thus, an accurate regularization of the tensor-valued internal variables is essential to obtain physically correct results. Here, we focus on the regularization of anisotropic damage at finite strains. Thus, a flexible anisotropic damage model with isotropic, kinematic, and distortional hardening is equipped with three gradient-extensions using a full and two reduced regularizations of the damage tensor. Theoretical and numerical comparisons of the three gradient-extensions yield excellent agreement between the full and the reduced regularization based on a volumetric-deviatoric regularization using only two nonlocal degrees of freedom.

Nature has always been our inspiration in the research, design and development of materials and has driven us to gain a deep understanding of the mechanisms that characterize anisotropy and inelastic behavior. All this knowledge has been accumulated in the principles of thermodynamics. Deduced from these principles, the multiplicative decomposition combined with pseudo potentials are powerful and universal concepts. Simultaneously, the tremendous increase in computational performance enabled us to investigate and rethink our history-dependent material models to make the most of our predictions. Today, we have reached a point where materials and their models are becoming increasingly sophisticated. This raises the question: How do we find the best model that includes all inelastic effects to explain our complex data? Constitutive Artificial Neural Networks (CANN) may answer this question. Here, we extend the CANNs to inelastic materials (iCANN). Rigorous considerations of objectivity, rigid motion of the reference configuration, multiplicative decomposition and its inherent non-uniqueness, restrictions of energy and pseudo potential, and consistent evolution guide us towards the architecture of the iCANN satisfying thermodynamics per design. We combine feed-forward networks of the free energy and pseudo potential with a recurrent neural network approach to take time dependencies into account. We demonstrate that the iCANN is capable of autonomously discovering models for artificially generated data, the response of polymers for cyclic loading and the relaxation behavior of muscle data. As the design of the network is not limited to visco-elasticity, our vision is that the iCANN will reveal to us new ways to find the various inelastic phenomena hidden in the data and to understand their interaction. Our source code, data, and examples are available at doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10066805, Comment: 54 pages, 14 figures, 14 tables

The development of tissue-engineered cardiovascular implants can improve the lives of large segments of our society who suffer from cardiovascular diseases. Regenerative tissues are fabricated using a process called tissue maturation. Furthermore, it is highly challenging to produce cardiovascular regenerative implants with sufficient mechanical strength to withstand the loading conditions within the human body. Therefore, biohybrid implants for which the regenerative tissue is reinforced by standard reinforcement material (e.g. textile or 3d printed scaffold) can be an interesting solution. In silico models can significantly contribute to characterizing, designing, and optimizing biohybrid implants. The first step towards this goal is to develop a computational model for the maturation process of tissue-engineered implants. This paper focuses on the mechanical modeling of textile-reinforced tissue-engineered cardiovascular implants. First, we propose an energy-based approach to compute the collagen evolution during the maturation process. Then, we apply the concept of structural tensors to model the anisotropic behavior of the extracellular matrix and the textile scaffold. Next, the newly developed material model is embedded into a special solid-shell finite element formulation with reduced integration. Finally, we use our framework to compute two structural problems: a pressurized shell construct and a tubular-shaped heart valve. The results show the ability of the model to predict collagen growth in response to the boundary conditions applied during the maturation process. Consequently, we can predict the implant's mechanical response, such as the deformation and stresses of the implant., Comment: Preprint submitted to Elsevier

The goal of the current work is to explore direction-dependent damage initiation and propagation within an arbitrary anisotropic solid. In particular, we aim at developing anisotropic cohesive phase-field (PF) damage models by extending the idea introduced in \cite{REZAEI2021a} for direction-dependent fracture energy and also anisotropic PF damage models based on structural tensors. The cohesive PF damage formulation used in the current contribution is motivated by the works of \cite{LORENTZ201120, wu2018, GEELEN2019}. The results of the latter models are shown to be insensitive with respect to the length scale parameter for the isotropic case. This is because they manage to formulate the fracture energy as a function of diffuse displacement jumps in the localized damaged zone. In the present paper, we discuss numerical examples and details on finite element implementations where the fracture energy, as well as the material strength, are introduced as an arbitrary function of the crack direction. Using the current formulation for anisotropic cohesive fracture, the obtained results are almost insensitive with respect to the length scale parameter. The latter is achieved by including the direction-dependent strength of the material in addition to its fracture energy. Utilizing the current formulation, one can increase the mesh size which reduces the computational time significantly without any severe change in the predicted crack path and overall obtained load-displacement curves. We also argue that these models still lack to capture mode-dependent fracture properties. Open issues and possible remedies for future developments are finally discussed as well.