CDS&E/Collaborative Research: A Symbolic Artificial Intelligence Framework for Discovering Physically Interpretable Constitutive Laws of Soft Functional Composites

This Computational and Data-Enabled Science and Engineering (CDS&E) collaborative research grant supports fundamental research to enable automatic discovery of constitutive laws for soft functional composites using symbolic artificial intelligence (AI). Soft functional composites are essential to emerging technological and economic areas such as stretchable and wearable electronics, soft robotics, and sensing and actuation. Conventional methods for constitutive law discovery are usually time-consuming, inefficient, and often ineffective for complex cases. This project will significantly accelerate the constitutive law discovery process by leveraging symbolic AI technology not only for soft functional composites but also other material classes. The software tools developed will be made available to the research and education communities through a website. This project will also train undergraduate and graduate students, including underrepresented groups, workforce in the transdisciplinary area of AI, mechanics, and materials science. The project will establish a symbolic AI framework for discovering physically interpretable constitutive laws of soft functional composites, involving general tensor functions of constitutive laws, both scalar and tensor-based operators, and statistical analysis for noisy data. The project will establish general tensor functions of constitutive laws for different anisotropic materials using modified representation and symmetry theories. The symbolic-AI architecture will be built upon genome representation, physics constraints, symbolic tree search, and statistic modeling, and will be applied to discover and interpret mechano-physical constitutive laws of soft functional composites with various microstructures. The tool and the insights it provides will expedite the design and applications of soft functional composites, and eventually other material classes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.