Time series forecasting of multiphase microstructure evolution using deep learning

Microstructure evolution, which plays a critical role in determining materials properties, is commonly simulated by the high-fidelity but computationally expensive phase-field method. To address this, we approximate microstructure evolution as a time series forecasting problem within the domain of deep learning. Our approach involves implementing a cost-effective surrogate model that accurately predicts the spatiotemporal evolution of microstructures, taking an example of spinodal decomposition in binary and ternary mixtures. Our surrogate model combines a convolutional autoencoder to reduce the dimensional representation of these microstructures with convolutional recurrent neural networks to forecast their temporal evolution. We use different variants of recurrent neural networks to compare their efficacy in developing surrogate models for phase-field predictions. On average, our deep learning framework demonstrates excellent accuracy and speedup relative to the “ground truth” phase-field simulations. We use quantitative measures to demonstrate how surrogate model predictions can effectively replace the phase-field timesteps without compromising accuracy in predicting the long-term evolution trajectory. Additionally, by emulating a transfer learning approach, our framework performs satisfactorily in predicting new microstructures resulting from alloy composition and physics unknown to the model. Therefore, our approach offers a useful data-driven alternative and accelerator to the materials microstructure simulation workflow.