Sun Research Group at Columbia University
  • Home
  • News
  • PI
  • Team Members
  • Publications
  • Research
  • Teaching
  • Software & Data
  • Presentations
  • Recruitment & Advice
  • Home
  • News
  • PI
  • Team Members
  • Publications
  • Research
  • Teaching
  • Software & Data
  • Presentations
  • Recruitment & Advice

Our paper on immersed phase field model for simulating cracks with Darcy-Stokes flow has been selected as the Editor's pick for Physics of Fluids

1/11/2021

0 Comments

 
An immersed phase field fracture model for microporomechanics with Darcy–Stokes flow 

Physics of Fluids 33, 016603 (2021); https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0035602
 
​Hyoung Suk Suh
 (서형석) and  WaiChing Sun (孫維正)

ABSTRACT
This paper presents an immersed phase field model designed to predict the fracture-induced flow due to brittle fracture in vuggy porous media. Due to the multiscale nature of pores in the vuggy porous material, crack growth may connect previously isolated pores, which leads to flow conduits. This mechanism has important implications for many applications such as disposal of carbon dioxide and radioactive materials and hydraulic fracture and mining. To understand the detailed microporomechanics that causes the fracture-induced flow, we introduce a new phase field fracture framework where the phase field is not only used as an indicator function for damage of the solid skeleton but also used as an indicator of the pore space. By coupling the Stokes equation that governs the fluid transport in the voids, cavities, and cracks and Darcy’s flow in the deformable porous media, our proposed model enables us to capture the fluid–solid interaction of the pore fluid and solid constituents during crack growth. Numerical experiments are conducted to analyze how the presence of cavities affects the accuracy of predictions based on the homogenized effective medium during crack growth.
Picture
0 Comments

Our manuscript on comparing operator-splitting/monolithic algorithms for modeling deformation twinning in polycrystal has been accepted by IJNME

10/27/2020

0 Comments

 
For some polycrystalline materials such as austenitic stainless steel, magnesium, TATB, and HMX, twinning is a crucial deformation mechanism when the dislocation slip alone is not enough to accommodate the applied strain. To predict this coupling effect between crystal plasticity and deformation twinning, we introduce a mathematical model and the corresponding monolithic and operator splitting solver that couples the crystal plasticity material model with a phase field twining model such that the twinning nucleation and propagation can be captured via an implicit function. While a phase-field order parameter is introduced to quantify the twinning induced shear strain and corresponding crystal reorientation, the evolution of the order parameter is driven by the resolved shear stress on the twinning system. To avoid introducing an additional set of slip systems for dislocation slip within the twinning region, we introduce a Lie algebra averaging technique to determine the Schmid tensor throughout the twinning transformation. Three different numerical schemes are proposed to solve the coupled problem, including a monolithic scheme, an alternating minimization scheme, and an operator splitting scheme. Three numerical examples are utilized to demonstrate the capability of the proposed model,
as well as the accuracy and computational cost of the solvers. [preprint]
​
0 Comments

Our paper on non-cooperative machine learning game that simulates competitions of AIs validating and falsifying constitutive laws accepted in CMAME

10/12/2020

0 Comments

 
There are many journal articles dedicated to constitutive models that show good matches on selected data. However, how useful are these models if we don't report or know their weakness? Our recently accepted CMAME paper uses deep reinforcement learning and game theory to explore this important question. By conceptualizing the efforts to validating and falsifying the model as a competing activities, we introduce AI agents to compete against each others to explore each others' weakness and through competition improving the resultant model and finding the Nash equilibrium that represents the limits of the state-of-the-art of each model, hand-crafted or AI-generated. The interesting aspect is that this competition can be applied to any material laws and data set. Please consider submit data/model to us and we can validate and falsify the model for you. More information can be found in the preprint [PDF].
0 Comments

Video lectures on multiscale DEM-FEM and modeling granular contacts with level set MPM method for ALERT summer school now available at youtube

10/12/2020

0 Comments

 
The lectures for the entire 3-day workshop can be found at the official website of ALERT. 

alertgeomaterials.eu/2020/10/videos-of-the-doctoral-school-2020/

Special thanks to the organizers, Professors Wei Wu and Manuel Pastor, and the colleagues who attend the talks. 
0 Comments

Our PhD student Hyoung Suk Suh passed the qualification exam

8/17/2020

0 Comments

 
PhD student Hyoung Suk Suh passed the qualification exam. His work is on modeling the thawing and freezing of frozen porous media. In the proposal talk, Hyoung Suk introduces the mathematical framework requires to simulate the freezing and thawing of porous media at the pore scale (see the rehearsal Youtube Video below). 
Since joining the research group in Fall 2018, Hyoung Suk has published two journal articles and one conference paper. 

H.S. Suh, D. O'Conner, W.C. Sun, A phase field model for cohesive fracture in micropolar continua, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, doi:10.1016/j.cma.2020.113181, 2020. 
H.S. Suh, W.C. Sun, An open source FEniCS implementation of a phase field fracture model for micropolar continua, International Journal of Multiscale Computational Engineering,
​ 
doi:10.1615/IntJMultCompEng.2020033422, 2019. [open source code]
H.S. Suh, 
W.C. Sun, An immersed phase field fracture model in fluid-infiltrating porous media with evolving Beavers-Joseph-Saffman condition, 2nd International Conference on Energy Geotechnics, La Jolla, California, USA, 2021. 

Congratulations, Hyoung Suk! 
0 Comments

PhD student Eric Bryant successfully defended his PhD thesis and will join T-3 at Los Alamos National Laboratory

8/13/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
I am excited to announce that our PhD student Eric Bryant has successfully defended his dissertation "Capturing Evolving Size-Dependent Anisotropy from Brittle Fracture to Plasticity for Geological Materials" and will join Los Alamos National Laboratory as postdoc research associate. His primary appointment will be with the fluid dynamics and solid mechanics group of the Theoretical Division (T-3).

During his tenure in the Sun research group, Eric has been awarded the Presidential Fellowship and the Guggenheim Fellowship. His PhD work focuses on modeling the size effect of evolving anisotropy of fracture and plastic deformation. Traditionally, one may introduce scaling law to incorporate how shear and tensile strengths depend on the size of the specimen. In his work, the main focus is also to investigate how does the rotation among the principal directions of the elastic strain, tensorial internal variables and stress tensor evolves across length scales and during the deformation process. He is the authors of 4 journal articles and one manuscript very close to completion. Among them, three of them published in Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, and one in International Journal of Fracture as listed below. 

Congratulations, Eric! 

Published work:
  1. A. Qinami, E.C. Bryant, W.C. Sun, M. Kaliske, Circumventing mesh bias via r-and h-adaptive refinement techniques for the variational eigenfracture model, International Journal of Fracture, doi:10.1007/s10704-019-00349-x, ​2019. 
  2. E.C. Bryant, W.C. Sun, Mixed-mode phase field fracture for secondary cracks in isotropic and anisotropic brittle rocks with consistent kinematics, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, doi:10.1016/j.cma.2018.08.008, 2018. [PDF]
  3. E.C. Bryant, W.C. Sun, micromorphic-regularized anisotropic Cam-clay-type model for capturing size-dependent anisotropy, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, doi:10.1016/j.cma.2019.05.003, 2019. 
  4. S. Na, E.C. Bryant, W.C. Sun, A configurational force for adaptive re-meshing of gradient-enhanced poromechanics problems with history-dependent variables, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, doi:10.1016/j.cma.2019.112572, 2019. [PDF]
  5. E.C. Bryant, W.C. Sun, ​Phase field modeling of frictional slip with slip weakening/strengthening  under non-isothermal conditions, in preparation. 

0 Comments

Official announcement from the IACM on the John Argyris Award.

7/20/2020

0 Comments

 

Prof. Steve WaiChing Sun @Poromechanics is the #IACM 2020 John Argyris Awardee This Award recognizes outstanding accomplishments among Young Scientists in Computational Mechanics. Congratulations!!! #IACM #IACMAwards2020 #IACMJohnArgyrisAward https://t.co/m46iUXIFoo pic.twitter.com/vlyxsSYhUM

— IACM (@IACM_Community) July 20, 2020
0 Comments

Part I of our paper series on geometric learning and Sobolev training for computational mechanics has been accepted by CMAME

7/19/2020

0 Comments

 
Author: Nikolas Vlassis, WaiChing Sun
Abstract: We present a machine learning approach that integrates geometric deep learning and Sobolev training to generate a family of finite strain anisotropic hyperelastic models that predict the homogenized responses of polycrystals previously unseen during the training. While hand-crafted hyperelasticity models often incorporate homogenized measures of microstructural attributes, such as the porosity or the averaged orientation of constitutes, these measures may not adequately reflect the topological structures of the attributes. We fill this knowledge gap by introducing the concept of the weighted graph as a new high-dimensional descriptor that represents topological information, such as the connectivity of anisotropic grains in an assemble. By leveraging a graph convolutional deep neural network in a hybrid machine learning architecture previously used in Frankel et al. 2019, the artificial intelligence extracts low-dimensional features from the weighted graphs and subsequently learns the influence of these low-dimensional features on the resultant stored elastic energy functionals. To ensure smoothness and prevent unintentionally generating a non-convex stored energy functional, we adopt the Sobolev training method for neural networks such that a stress measure is obtained implicitly by taking directional derivatives of the trained energy functional. Results from numerical experiments suggest that Sobolev training is capable of generating a hyperelastic energy functional that predicts both the elastic energy and stress measures more accurately than the classical training that minimizes L2 norm. Verification exercises against unseen benchmark FFT simulations and phase-field fracture simulations using the geometric learning generated elastic energy functional are conducted to demonstrate the quality of the predictions. [manuscript]
0 Comments

PhD student Jarett Poliner won the prestigious NDSEG Fellowship.

7/3/2020

0 Comments

 
Congratulations again to my Ph.D. student Jarett Poliner for winning the NDSEG Fellowship!
​

Congratulations again to my Ph.D. student Jarett Poliner for winning the NDSEG Fellowship! https://t.co/TQNeTuNSz6

— Steve Sun (@Poromechanics) July 3, 2020
0 Comments

USACM Summer Seminar

6/18/2020

0 Comments

 
Presenter: Dr. Steve WaiChing Sun, Columbia University
Title: Some applications of graph theory in data-driven multi-scale mechanics
Video: Watch a recording of the seminar ​
Abstract: In this talk, we will share our experience in using undirected and directed graphs to solve computational solid mechanics problems with a variety of deep neural networks. In the first half of the talk, we will focus on the usage of undirected weighted graphs that represent the microstructures. We will demonstrate 1) how to effectively represent microstructures such as polycrystals, granular assemblies and composites as node-weighted graphs, a network of nodes with assigned attributes connected by edges, 2) how to create low-dimensional topological descriptors via graph convolution neural network that exhibits spatial and rotational invariance properties and 3) how these topological descriptors can be used to enhance the accuracy and robustness of the forward predictions and generalize the surrogate constitutive models generated via semi-supervised learning. In the second half of the talk, we will examine the application of directed multi-graphs that represent causality/relational knowledge of material laws. By idealizing the process of modeling constitutive laws as a multi-player game, we will examine 4) how the process of writing, validating and falsifying a constitutive law can be formulated as a Markov decision process, and 5) how a model-free deep reinforcement learning paradigm can introduce  artificial intelligence (AI) modelers and experimentalists that learn to create hand-crafted-like constitutive models through competitions and repeated trial and errors. Examples will be provide to illustrate how  these self-interacting, self-improving AI agents discover new hidden hierarchical structures of mechanics knowledge,  spot the weakness of existing models and create new approaches to incorporate non-Euclidean data traditionally excluded in constitutive laws to make predictions more accurate and robust. 
0 Comments

Our postdoctoral Research Scientist Dr. Chuanqi Liu has received an offer to join the Chinese Academy of Sciences as an associate professor.

6/3/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Our postdoctoral research scientist Chuanqi Liu has just received an offer from the Institute of Mechanics in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He is selected by the 100 talent program (pioneering project) of CAS and is offered the position as an associate professor. During his tenure with us, Chuanqi has been a productive member of our team and has published the following peer-reviewed articles: 

  1. C. Liu", W.C. Sun, ILS-MPM: an unbiased implicit level-set-based material point method for frictional particulate contact mechanics of deformable particles, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, accepted, 2020. [PDF]
  2. C. Liu", W.C. Sun, Shift domain material point method for solids in the finite deformation range, special thematic issue for Meshfree and Particle Methods for Modeling Extreme Loadings, Computational Particle Mechanics, doi: 10.1007/s40571-019-00239-y, 2019. [PDF]

Congratulations, Chuanqi! 

0 Comments

Our paper on modeling polycrystal salt with precipitation creep, fracture and healing has also been accepted by CMAME today

5/25/2020

0 Comments

 
We present a new thermal-mechanical-chemical-phase field model that captures the multi-physical coupling effects of precipitation creeping, crystal plasticity, anisotropic fracture, and crack healing in polycrystalline rock at various temperature and strain-rate regimes. This model is solved via a fast Fourier transfer solver with an operator-split algorithm to update displacement, temperature and phase field, and chemical concentration incrementally. In nuclear waste disposal in salt formation, brine inside the crystal salt may migrate along the grain boundary and cracks due to the gradient of interfacial energy and pressure. This migration has a significant implication on the permeability evolution, creep deformation, and crack healing within rock salt but is difficult to incorporate implicitly via effective medium theories compared with computational homogenization.
As such, we introduce a thermodynamic framework and a corresponding computational implementation that explicitly captures the brine diffusion along the grain boundary and crack at the grain scale. Meanwhile, the anisotropic fracture and healing are captured via a high-order phase field that represents the regularized crack region in which a newly derived non-monotonic driving force is used to capture the fracture and healing due to the solution precipitation. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the capacity of the thermodynamic framework to capture the multiphysics material behaviors of rock salt. This paper is Part II of our work on modeling polycrystal salt for nuclear waste disposal. 

Reference
  1. S. Na, W.C. Sun, Computational thermomechanics of crystalline rock. Part I: a combined multi-phase-field/crystal plasticity approach for single crystal simulations, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 338:657-691, doi:10.1016/j.cma.2017.12.022, 2018. [PDF][Bibtex]
  2. R. Ma",  W.C. Sun, Computational thermomechanics for crystalline rock. Part II: chemo-damage-plasticity and healing in strongly anisotropic polycrystals, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, accepted, 2020. [manuscript]
0 Comments

Our paper on imposing the physical length scale of micro-polar phase field model for cohesive fracture has been accepted by CMAME

5/25/2020

0 Comments

 
While crack nucleation and propagation in the brittle or quasi-brittle regime can be predicted via variational or material-force-based phase field fracture models, these models often assume that the underlying elastic response of the material is non-polar and yet a length scale parameter must be introduced to enable the sharp cracks represented by a regularized implicit function. However, many materials with internal microstructures that contain surface tension, micro-cracks, micro-fracture, inclusion, cavity or those of particulate nature often exhibit size-dependent behaviors in both the path-independent and path-dependent regimes. This paper is intended to introduce a unified treatment that captures the size effect of the materials in both elastic and damaged states. By introducing a cohesive micropolar phase field fracture theory, along with the computational model and validation exercises, we explore the interacting size-dependent elastic deformation and fracture mechanisms exhibits in materials of complex microstructures. To achieve this goal, we introduce the distinctive degradation functions of the force-stress-strain and couple-stress-micro-rotation energy-conjugated pairs for a given regularization profile such that the macroscopic size-dependent responses of the micropolar continua is insensitive to the length scale parameter of the regularized interface. Then, we apply the variational principle to derive governing equations from the micropolar stored energy and dissipative functionals. Numerical examples are introduced to demonstrate the proper way to identify material parameters and the capacity of the new formulation to simulate complex crack patterns in the quasi-static regime. [manuscript]
0 Comments

Our paper on ILS-MPM modeling of granular assemblies with frictional contact mechanics is accepted by CMAME.

5/21/2020

0 Comments

 
One key drawback of classical discrete/distinct/granular element methods for particulate mechanics is that they cannot generate any kinetic and kinematics information at the sub-grain scales. Nevertheless, many dissipative mechanisms of granular materials are actually originated from path-dependent behaviors at the sub-grain scales where wear, damage, fracture and fragmentation occurs. This simplification therefore may lead to a departure of force chain topology and therefore make the resultant simulations inaccurate. Recovery of these sub-scale information while capturing the geometry and form of each individual grains is inherently a difficult task. 

In this work, our postdoc Dr. Chuanqi Liu introduces an implicit material point method designed to bypass meshing of bodies by employing level set functions to represent boundaries at structured grids. This implicit function representation provides an elegant means to link an unbiased intermediate reference surface with the true boundaries by closest point projection as shown Leichner et al. 2019. We then enforce the contact constraints by a penalty method where the Coulomb friction law is implemented as an elastoplastic constitutive model such that a return mapping algorithm can be used to provide constitutive updates for both the stick and slip states. To evolve the geometry of the contacts properly, the Hamilton-Jacobi equation is solved incrementally such that the level set and material points are both updated according to the deformation field. To improve the accuracy and regularity of the numerical integration of the material point method, a moving least square method is used to project numerical values of the material points back to the standard locations for Gaussian-Legendre quadrature. Several benchmarks are used to verify the proposed model. Comparisons with discrete element simulations are made to analyze the importance of stress fields on predicting the macroscopic responses of granular assemblies. [manuscript]
Picture
0 Comments

Professor Sun Receives 2020 IACM John Argyris Award for Young Investigators

2/14/2020

0 Comments

 
In recognition of his groundbreaking research illuminating the mechanics and physics of porous geomaterials like rocks, soil, concrete and salt, Professor Steve WaiChing Sun has earned the prestigious John Argyris Award for Young Scientists. This award is given by the International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM).
Bridging mathematical science, theoretical mechanics, and industrial applications, Sun’s interests focus on computational poromechanics and geomechanics for a variety of applications, ranging from carbon dioxide storage to disposal of nuclear waste. In addition to the John Argyris award, Sun has received several prominent international awards in theoretical and computational mechanics, including the Zienkiewicz Numerical Methods in Engineering Prize from Institution of Civil Engineers (UK), the ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute Leonardo de Vinci Award (USA), Dresden Fellowship (Germany), as well as the young investigator awards from funding agencies, including the US National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the US Air Force Young Investigator Program Award, and the US Army Young Investigator Program Award.
Highlighting distinguished scholarship and outstanding accomplishments, the biennial John Argyris Award for Young Scientists celebrates influential researchers 40 and under. Sun, an assistant professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics since 2014, will be the first Columbia faculty member and the first Chinese American to receive this honor. He will receive the award at the opening ceremony for the joint organization of the 14th IACM World Congress in Computational Mechanics and the 8th European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Science and Engineering this summer in Paris. [URL]

0 Comments

New committee in ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute for Machine Learning in Mechanics

2/10/2020

0 Comments

 
My colleagues and I have obtained the approval from the board of governors of ASCE EMI to establish a new committee in the ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute for applying machine learning to AI. The first meeting for this new committee will occur during the ASCE EMI conference at Columbia University this coming May. ​See [URL]
0 Comments

Our paper on SO(3)-invariance of elastoplasticity model generated from deep neural network accepted by CMAME

1/21/2020

0 Comments

 
Abstract:

This paper examines the frame-invariance  (and the lack thereof) exhibited in simulated anisotropic elasto-plastic responses generated from supervised machine learning of classical multi-layer and informed-graph-based neural networks, and proposes different remedies to fix this drawback. The inherent  hierarchical relations among physical quantities and state variables in an elasto-plasticity model are first represented as directed graphs,  where three variations of the graph are tested. While feed-forward neural networks are used to train path-independent constitutive relations (e.g., elasticity), recurrent neural networks are used to replicate responses that depends on the deformation history, i.e. or path dependent. In dealing with the objectivity deficiency, we use the spectral form to represent tensors and, subsequently, three metrics, the Euclidean distance between the Euler Angles, the distance from the identity matrix, and geodesic on the unit sphere in Lie algebra, can be employed to constitute objective functions for the supervised machine learning. In this, the aim is to minimize the measured distance between the true and the predicted 3D rotation entities. Following this, we conduct numerical experiments on how these metrics, which are theoretically equivalent, may lead to differences in the efficiency of the supervised machine learning as well as the accuracy and robustness of the resultant models. Neural network models trained with tensors represented in component form for a given Cartesian coordinate system are used as a benchmark. Our numerical tests show that, even given the same amount of information and data, the quality of the anisotropic elasto-plasticity model is highly sensitive to the way tensors are represented and measured. The results reveal that using a loss function based on geodesic on the unit sphere in Lie algebra together with an informed directed graph yield significantly more accurate rotation prediction than the other tested approaches. [PDF]
0 Comments

Our paper on solving strongly anisotropic phase field fracture model via FFT solver accepted by CMAME

12/5/2019

0 Comments

 
Abstract:
​This paper presents the application of a fast Fourier transform (
FFT) based method to solve two phase field models designed to simulate crack growth of strongly anisotropic materials in the brittle regime. By leveraging the ability of the FFT-based solver to generate solutions with global continuities, we design two simple algorithms to capture the complex fracture patterns (e.g. sawtooth, and curved crack growth) common in materials with strongly anisotropic surface energy via the multi-phase-field and high-order phase-field frameworks. A staggered operator-split solver is used where both the balance of linear momentum and the phase field governing equations are formulated in the periodic domain. The unit phase field of the initial failure region is prescribed by the penalty method to alleviate the sharp material contrast between the initial failure region and the base material. The discrete frequency vectors are generalized to estimate the second and fourth order gradients such that the Gibbs effect near shape interfaces or jump conditions can be suppressed. Furthermore, a pre-conditioner is adopted to improve the convergence rate of the iterative linear solver. Three numerical experiments are used to systematically compare the performance of the FFT-based method in the multi-phase-field and high-order phase-field frameworks. [PDF]
0 Comments

Our research on mechanics of drying and wetting induced fracture accepted by CMAME

9/18/2019

0 Comments

 
A phase field framework for capillary-induced fracture in unsaturated porous media: drying-induced vs. hydraulic cracking

Abstract: 
This article introduces a unified mathematical framework to replicate both desiccation-induced and hydraulic fracturing in low-permeable unsaturated porous materials observed in experiments. The unsaturated porous medium is considered as a three-phase solid-liquid-gas effective medium of which each constituent occupies a fraction of the representative elementary volume. As such, an energy-minimization-based phase-field model (PFM) is formulated along with the Biot's poroelasticity theory to replicate the sub-critical crack growth in the brittle regime.

Unlike hydraulic fracturing where the excess pore liquid pressure plays an important role at the onset and propagation of cracks, desiccation cracks are mainly driven by deformation induced by water retention. Therefore, the wettability of the solid skeleton may affect the evolution of the capillary pressure (suction) and change the path-dependent responses of the porous media. This air-water-solid interaction may either hinder or enhance the cracking occurrence. This difference of capillary effect on crack growth during wetting and drying is replicated by introducing retention-sensitive degradation mechanisms in our phase field fracture approach. To replicate the hydraulic behaviors of the pore space inside the host matrix and that of the cracks, the path-dependent changes of the intrinsic permeability due to crack growth and porosity changes are introduced to model the flow conduit in open and closed cracks. Numerical examples of drying-induced and hydraulic fracturing demonstrate the capability of the proposed model to capture different fracture patterns, which qualitatively agrees with the fracture mechanisms of related experiments documented in the literature. [PDF]
0 Comments

Sun Group awarded new a NSF Collaborative Research Grant for Interpretable Augmented Intelligence for Multiscale Material Discovery

9/16/2019

0 Comments

 
We are a part of the multi-university team who has been awarded a 2 million grant for leveraging interpretable  augmented intelligence for multiscale discovery. 

Award Abstract #1940203

Collaborative Research: I-AIM: Interpretable Augmented Intelligence for Multiscale Material Discovery

NSF Org:Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC)

ABSTRACT

The ability to model, predict, and improve the mechanical performance of engineering materials such as polymers, composites, and alloys can have a significant impact on manufacturing, with important economic and societal benefits. As advanced computational algorithms and data science approaches become available, they can be harnessed to disrupt the current approaches to materials modeling, and allow for the design and discovery of new high-strength, high-performance materials for manufacturing. Bringing together multidisciplinary teams of researchers can maximize the impact of these new tools and techniques. This Harnessing the Data Revolution Institutes for Data-Intensive Research in Science and Engineering (HDR-I-DIRSE) award supports the conceptualization of an Institute to develop novel data science methods, address fundamental scientific questions of Materials Engineering and Manufacturing, and build such multidisciplinary teams. The project will apply novel data science methods to advance the analysis of large sets of structural data of composite materials and alloys from the atomic scale to correlate with and predict mechanical properties. The methods are based on machine learning techniques and uncertainty quantification, and will help uncover underlying structural features in the materials that determine the properties and performance. The methods and results will help accelerate the development of ultra-high strength and lightweight carbon-based composites for aerospace applications, and multi-element superalloys for more durable engine parts, by navigating in the large possible design space and providing faster predictions than experiments and traditional simulation methods. The project will also lead to new methods and computational algorithms that will become publicly available. The investigators will train graduate and undergraduate students from various disciplines with a focus on engaging women and minorities in STEM fields, develop short courses that integrate novel Materials Science and Engineering applications and Data Science methods, and foster vertical integration of interdisciplinary research from undergraduate students to senior scientists.

This project aims at building an effective and interpretable learning framework for materials data across scales to solve a major challenge in current data-driven materials design. The combined Materials Science and Data Science approaches will synergistically contribute to the development and use of interpretable and physics-informed data science methodologies to gain new understanding of mechanical properties of polymer composites and alloys, with the potential to be expanded into different property sets and different systems. The PIs will utilize available data efficiently through combination with physical rules and prior knowledge, to develop an interpretable augmented intelligent system to learn principles behind the association of input structures with material properties with uncertainty quantification. The interconnected tasks involve the (1) collection and curation of large amounts of computational and experimental data for polymer/carbon nanotube composites and alloys from open data sources and targeted calculations and experiments, (2) the development of geometric and topological methods incorporating physical principles to generate a better, more sensitive low-dimensional representation of the multidimensional data and characterize the parameter space related to mechanical properties, (3) the development of a Bayesian deep reinforcement learning framework to generate interpretable knowledge graphs that depict the relational knowledge among physical quantities with uncertainty quantification, and (4) the prediction of mechanical properties to reveal design principles to improve materials performance, evaluate and validate the methods, and develop software for dissemination.

This project is part of the National Science Foundation's Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) Big Idea activity and is co-funded by the Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. 

More information can be found in the official announcement from NSF [URL].  












0 Comments

Our configurational force method for remeshing gradient-enhanced poromechanics problems with internal variables published in CMAME

7/31/2019

0 Comments

 
A configurational force for adaptive re-meshing of gradient-enhanced poromechanics problems with history-dependent variables​

SeonHong Na, Eric C Bryant, Waiching Sun
​

We introduce a mesh-adaption framework that employs a multi-physical configurational force and Lie algebra to capture multi-physical responses of fluid-infiltrating geological materials while maintaining the efficiency of the computational models. To resolve sharp changes of both displacement and pore pressure, we introduce an energy-estimate-free re-meshing criterion by extending the configurational force theory to consider the energy dissipation due to the fluid diffusion and the gradient-dependent plastic flow. To establish new equilibria after re-meshing, the local tensorial history-dependent variables at the integration points are first decomposed into spectral forms. Then, the principal value and direction are projected onto a smooth field interpolated by the basis function of the finite element space via the Lie-algebra mapping. Our numerical results indicate that this Lie algebra operator, in general, leads to a new trial state closer to the equilibrium than the ones obtained from the tensor component mapping approach. A new configurational force for dissipative fluid-infiltrating porous materials that exhibit gradient-dependent plastic flow is introduced such that the re-meshing may accommodate the need to resolve the sharp pressure gradient as well as the strain localization. The predicted responses are found to be not influenced by the mesh size due to the micromorphic regularization, while the adaptive meshing enables us to capture the width of deformation bands without the necessity of employing fine mesh everywhere in the domain. [PDF]
0 Comments

USNCCM Slides for Meta-modeling

7/30/2019

0 Comments

 
0 Comments

USNCCM Austin Presentations

7/24/2019

0 Comments

 
2019-07-29
#1971999 - A Cooperative Two-player Game for Data-driven Discovery of Elasto-plasticity Knowledge Represented in Directed Graph
02:00 - 02:20
Minisymposium#203 Data-driven Modeling Using Uncertainty Quantification, Machine Learning and Optimization
Authors Kun Wang ,WaiChing Sun * ,Qiang Du
LocationR oom # Lone Star Ballroom F - LVL 3
​
We introduce a multi-agent meta-modeling game to generate data, knowledge, and models that make predictions on constitutive responses of elasto-plastic materials. We introduce a new concept from graph theory where a modeler agent is tasked with evaluating all the modeling options recast as a directed multigraph and find the optimal path that links the source of the directed graph (e.g. strain history) to the target (e.g. stress) measured by an objective function. Meanwhile, the data agent, which is tasked with generating data from real or virtual experiments (e.g. molecular dynamics, discrete element simulations), interacts with the modeling agent sequentially and uses reinforcement learning to design new experiments to optimize the prediction capacity. Consequently, this treatment enables us to emulate an idealized scientific collaboration as selections of the optimal choices in a decision tree search done automatically via deep reinforcement learning.

2019-07-31
#1971644 - Data-driven Validation of Bishop’s Effective Stress Principle through Deep Reinforcement Learning
02:20 - 02:40
Minisymposium#105 Computational Geomechanics, in honor of Prof. Mary F. Wheeler
Authors Yousef Heider * ,Kun Wang ,Hyoung Suk Suh ,WaiChing Sun
Location Room # Lone Star Ballroom C - LVL 3


In analogy to Terzaghi’s effective stress principle in fully-saturated porous media, Bishop’s effective stress principle presents a partition of the total stress in unsaturated porous media between suction and effective stress contributions. Although widely applied in Geomechanics, the validity and generality of Bishop’s principle across saturation regimes still a matter of debate, especially for path-dependent materials that exhibit hysteresis retention behaviors. The proposed meta-modeling automated learning approach makes use of data-based constitutive modeling, generated via reinforcement learning, to evaluate the validity and generality of Bishop’s effective stress principle for various types of blind predictions involving material failures, such as strain localization and brittle fracture. Synthetic micro-structural-based data of unsaturated granular materials (such as coordination number, fabric tensor, porosity, saturation, suction, and intrinsic permeability) are generated using the discrete element method DEM together with the pore-network approach, applied to a representative volume element (RVE). Data set generated from sub-scale simulations are used to automatically create, train, calibrate and validate plausible alternative stress partition theories represented by directed graphs until an optimal knowledge graph is formed. The blind prediction performance of the data-driven discovery will then be compared with predictions based on different variations of the effective stress principle for unsaturated porous media.

2019-07-31
#1971799 - A Micromorphic-regularized Cam-clay-type Model for Capturing Size-dependent Anisotropy in Geological materials
05:30 - 05:50
Minisymposium#105 Computational Geomechanics, in honor of Prof. Mary F. Wheeler
Authors Eric Bryant* ,WaiChing Sun
LocationRoom # Lone Star Ballroom C - LVL 3

We introduce a micromorphic-regularized anisotropic modified Cam-clay model which captures the size-dependent anisotropic elastoplastic responses for clay, mudstone, shales and sedimentary rock. To capture the distinctive anisotropic effect induced by the micro-structures of clay particle aggregate, clusters, peds, micro-fabric and mineral contact, we use a mapping the links the anisotropic stress state to a fictitious stress space to introduce anisotropy to the modified Cam-clay model at the material point scale. Meanwhile, the meso-scale aniostropy is captured via an anisotropic micromorphic regularization model such that the gradient-enhanced plastic flow may exhibit anisotropic responses via a diffusivity tensor. This diffusivity tensor enables the micromorphic regularized model to exhibit plastic flow non-co-axial to the stress gradient of the yield function without introducing non-associate flow rules and hence provide additional degree of freedom for modelers to capture the size-dependent ansiotropy of geological materials that exhibit different anisotropic responses across different length scales. Numerical examples are used to examine the volumetric locking and numerical stability issues that may occur at critical state where isochoric plastic flow dominates the deformation mode. In particular, we present evidence that the micromorphic regularization could also be a potential remedy to overcome the volumetric locking and the spurious checkerboard modes. The influence of the size-dependent anisotropy on the formation and propagation of shear band in the anisotropic material is demonstrated. In the future, we will explore coupling to a phase field fracture model, in order to predict the wide spectrum of brittle and ductile anisotropic responses.
0 Comments

Oral and Poster Presentation by Sun Group at EMI Caltech

6/12/2019

0 Comments

 
Our research group will present our latest findings in 6 oral presentations and 1 poster presentation at ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute Conference at Caltech  The schedule of the presentations is listed below in chronological order. The time and the topics are listed below. Most of our talk will be at 142 Keck 72. Please note that the lectures might not begin on time. 

​
1. A multiscale FE-FFT approach for modeling crack initiation and propagation in polycrystalline rock salt. Poster presentation by postdoc research scientist Dr. Ran Ma. 

​
2. A cooperative game for automated learning of elastoplasticity knowledge graphs and models with AI-guided experimentation. Oral presentation by the PI (WaiChing Sun). MS25, Room: 142 Keck (72) Thursday 20th 10:30 am-10:45 am 

3. An adaptive ensemble phase field predictions for localized failures in geological materials. Oral presentation by PhD candidate Kun Wang. MS25, Room: 142 Keck (72) Thursday 20th 10:45 am-11:00 am 

​
4. A micromorphic-regularized anisotropic Cam-clay-type model for capturing size-dependent anisotropy. Oral presentation by PhD student Eric Bryant, MS25, Room: 142 Keck (72) Thursday 20th 10:30 am-10:45 am 

​
5. Shift domain material point method: an image-to-simulation workflow for solids of complex geometries undergoing large deformation. Oral presentation by postdoc research scientist Chuanqi Liu, MS25, Room: 142 Keck (72) Thursday 20th 11:30 am-11:45 am 

​
6. Adaptive mesh-refinement for poromechanics Problems of high-order continua: a configurational force approach, Oral presentation given by Professor SeonHong Na (PhD graduate and former research scientist of the group, now assistant professor at McMaster University), Room 142 Keck (72), Friday 21st, 2 pm-2:15 pm.

​
7. Bootstrapping critical state plasticity models for predicting cyclic undrained responses of granular Materials with a hierarchical knowledge polytree. Oral presentation by Nikolaos Vlassis, Wednesday 19th, 11:45 am-12:00 pm.

Read More
0 Comments

PhD Candidate Kun Wang will join Los Alamos National Laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher

6/4/2019

2 Comments

 
I am happy to announce that our Ph.D. candidate @Kun WANG has accepted a postdoc position at Los Alamos National Laboratory. His primary appointment will be with the fluid dynamics and solid mechanics group of the Theoretical Division (T-3). He is expected to begin his new position in the fall of 2019. Congratulations, Kun! 
Picture
2 Comments
<<Previous
Forward>>

    Group News

    News about Computational Poromechanics lab at Columbia University.

    Categories

    All
    Invited Talk
    Job Placements
    Journal Article
    Presentation
    Special Events

    Archives

    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    October 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    September 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    December 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    November 2013
    September 2013

    RSS Feed


Contact Information
Prof. Steve Sun
Phone: 212-851-4371 
Fax: +1 212-854-6267
Email: wsun@columbia.edu
Copyright @ 2014-2021.  All rights reserved.