Process–Material–Performance Trade-off Exploration of Materials Sintering with Machine Learning Models

Process-induced porosity, defects, and residual stresses lead to mechanical performance degradation in fiber-reinforced composite and other heterogeneous structures. Physical and chemical processes create complex process–material–performance relationships. Predicting porosity and residual stresses in this context requires computationally burdensome forward simulations and obtaining optimal process settings and calibrating properties of new materials requires solving inverse problems with predictions from the forward simulations. In this paper, we parameterized the process–material–performance space and created a dataset based on physics models that are valid for sintering ceramic powders. The dataset was used to train several machine learning models that captured the process–material–performance relationships. The trained ML models were applied in process optimization, calibration of properties for new material systems, and estimating performance for a given process and material. Support vector regression (SVR), convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) called REPAIRS were selected, and their prediction accuracy was determined. While the SVR and CNN models require training several models, we show that the GMM model captures the process–material–performance relationships with a single machine-learned model and partial system completion methods. The paper describes root-mean-square error and mean absolute percentage errors of the inferences from the models on a validation dataset.