Revealing the structure-property relationships of copper alloys with FAGC
This addresses a data scarcity problem in materials science for researchers studying alloy properties, though it appears incremental as it applies existing ML techniques to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of predicting electrical conductivity and hardness of Cu-Cr-Zr alloys from microstructural images with limited data, achieving high prediction accuracy (R²=0.978 for conductivity, R²=0.998 for hardness) using a feature augmentation method and decision tree classifier.
Cu-Cr-Zr alloys play a crucial role in electronic devices and the electric power industry, where their electrical conductivity and hardness are of great importance. However, due to the scarcity of available samples, there has been a lack of effective studies exploring the relationship between the microstructural images of Cu-Cr-Zr alloys and their key properties. In this paper, the FAGC feature augmentation method is employed to enhance the microstructural images of Cu-Cr-Zr alloys within a feature space known as the pre-shape space. Pseudo-labels are then constructed to expand the number of training samples. These features are then input into various machine learning models to construct performance prediction models for the alloy. Finally, we validate the impact of different machine learning methods and the number of augmented features on prediction accuracy through experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in predicting electrical conductivity (\(R^2=0.978\)) and hardness (\(R^2=0.998\)) when using the decision tree classifier with 100 augmented samples. Further analysis reveals that regions with reduced image noise, such as fewer grain or phase boundaries, exhibit higher contributions to electrical conductivity. These findings highlight the potential of the FAGC method in overcoming the challenges of limited image data in materials science, offering a powerful tool for establishing detailed and quantitative relationships between complex microstructures and material properties.