Wing K. Liu

Lei Zhang, Jiachen Guo, Guowei He et al.

Body-fitted finite-element methods deliver high-order accuracy but hinge on a clean, watertight, conforming mesh, a requirement that breaks down for the geometrically imperfect CAD assemblies, image-based volumetric data, and voxel-native designs that pervade biomedical engineering and additive manufacturing, where mesh generation has become the dominant cost of the analysis cycle. Immersed methods on regular background Cartesian grids sidestep body-fitted meshing, but classical implementations integrate over irregular cut subdomains, destroying the tensor-product structure that enables separable, reduced-order methods such as tensor decomposition. In this paper we propose the \emph{Immersed Tensor Decomposition} (ITD) framework, which couples a mesh-free geometric representation via body-fitted function with the separable C-HiDeNN-TD reduced-order solver to enable large-scale simulation directly on regular background voxel meshes. The geometry is encoded in three steps: a signed-distance function represents the boundary, a body-fitted function $Φ$ approximates it with controllable error, and a low-rank Tucker decomposition provides model-order reduction; for a fixed grid spacing $h$, accuracy is improved by raising the approximation order of C-HiDeNN interpolation up to degree $p$ with a linear background mesh. The central contribution is an exact Dirichlet formulation that enforces the boundary condition strongly by multiplying the trial function with $Φ$, so that $u=g$ holds by construction without any variational penalty or interface quadrature. We establish an a priori error estimate for the formulation and assess it on canonical 2D/3D domains, demonstrating optimal convergence and robustness on non-Cartesian geometries discretized by regular voxel meshes.

Kungang Zhang, Wei Chen, Wing K. Liu et al.

Microstructure of materials is often characterized through image analysis to understand processing-structure-properties linkages. We propose a largely automated framework that integrates unsupervised and supervised learning methods to classify micrographs according to microstructure phase/class and, for multiphase microstructures, segments them into different homogeneous regions. With the advance of manufacturing and imaging techniques, the ultra-high resolution of imaging that reveals the complexity of microstructures and the rapidly increasing quantity of images (i.e., micrographs) enables and necessitates a more powerful and automated framework to extract materials characteristics and knowledge. The framework we propose can be used to gradually build a database of microstructure classes relevant to a particular process or group of materials, which can help in analyzing and discovering/identifying new materials. The framework has three steps: (1) segmentation of multiphase micrographs through a recently developed score-based method so that different microstructure homogeneous regions can be identified in an unsupervised manner; (2) {identification and classification of} homogeneous regions of micrographs through an uncertainty-aware supervised classification network trained using the segmented micrographs from Step $1$ with their identified labels verified via the built-in uncertainty quantification and minimal human inspection; (3) supervised segmentation (more powerful than the segmentation in Step $1$) of multiphase microstructures through a segmentation network trained with micrographs and the results from Steps $1$-$2$ using a form of data augmentation. This framework can iteratively characterize/segment new homogeneous or multiphase materials while expanding the database to enhance performance. The framework is demonstrated on various sets of materials and texture images.