Pavana Prabhakar

Haotian Feng, Sabarinathan P Subramaniyan, Hridyesh Tewani et al.

Woven fabrics play an essential role in everyday textiles for clothing/sportswear, water filtration, and retaining walls, to reinforcements in stiff composites for lightweight structures like aerospace, sporting, automotive, and marine industries. Several possible combinations of weave patterns and material choices, which comprise weave architecture, present a challenging question about how they could influence the physical and mechanical properties of woven fabrics and reinforced structures. In this paper, we present a novel Physics-Constrained Neural Network (PCNN) to predict the mechanical properties like the modulus of weave architectures and the inverse problem of predicting pattern/material sequence for a design/target modulus value. The inverse problem is particularly challenging as it usually requires many iterations to find the appropriate architecture using traditional optimization approaches. We show that the proposed PCNN can effectively predict weave architecture for the desired modulus with higher accuracy than several baseline models considered. We present a feature-based optimization strategy to improve the predictions using features in the Grey Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) space. We combine PCNN with this feature-based optimization to discover near-optimal weave architectures to facilitate the initial design of weave architecture. The proposed frameworks will primarily enable the woven composite analysis and optimization process, and be a starting point to introduce Knowledge-guided Neural Networks into the complex structural analysis.

Zahra Rahimi Afzal, Pavana Prabhakar, Pavithra Prabhakar

In this paper, we address the problem of synthesizing optimal path plans in a 2D subject to spatio-temporal and thermal constraints. Our solution consists of reducing the path planning problem to a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem. The challenge is in encoding the implication constraints in the path planning problem using only conjunctions that are permitted by the MILP formulation. Our experimental analysis using an implementation of the encoding in a Python toolbox demonstrates the feasibility of our approach in generating the optimal plans.

Haotian Feng, Pavana Prabhakar

Stress analysis of heterogeneous media, like composite materials, using Finite Element Analysis (FEA) has become commonplace in design and analysis. However, determining stress distributions in heterogeneous media using FEA can be computationally expensive in situations like optimization and multi-scaling. To address this, we utilize Deep Learning for developing a set of novel Difference-based Neural Network (DiNN) frameworks based on engineering and statistics knowledge to determine stress distribution in heterogeneous media, for the first time, with special focus on discontinuous domains that manifest high stress concentrations. The novelty of our approach is that instead of directly using several FEA model geometries and stresses as inputs for training a Neural Network, as typically done previously, we focus on highlighting the differences in stress distribution between different input samples for improving the accuracy of prediction in heterogeneous media. We evaluate the performance of DiNN frameworks by considering different types of geometric models that are commonly used in the analysis of composite materials, including volume fraction and spatial randomness. Results show that the DiNN structures significantly enhance the accuracy of stress prediction compared to existing structures, especially for composite models with random volume fraction when localized high stress concentrations are present.