Machine learning for material characterization with an application for predicting mechanical properties

Abstract

Currently, the growth of material data from experiments and simulations is expanding beyond processable amounts. This makes the development of new data-driven methods for the discovery of patterns among multiple lengthscales and time-scales and structure-property relationships essential. These data-driven approaches show enormous promise within materials science. The following review covers machine learning (ML) applications for metallic material characterization. Many parameters associated with the processing and the structure of materials affect the properties and the performance of manufactured components. Thus, this study is an attempt to investigate the usefulness of ML methods for material property prediction. Material characteristics such as strength, toughness, hardness, brittleness, or ductility are relevant to categorize a material or component according to their quality. In industry, material tests like tensile tests, compression tests, or creep tests are often time consuming and expensive to perform. Therefore, the application of ML approaches is considered helpful for an easier generation of material property information. This study also gives an application of ML methods on small punch test (SPT) data for the determination of the property ultimate tensile strength for various materials. A strong correlation between SPT data and tensile test data was found which ultimately allows to replace more costly tests by simple and fast tests in combination with ML.