Isaac Newton may have met his match.
For centuries, engineers have relied on physical laws — developed by Newton and others — to understand the stresses and strains on the materials they work with. But solving those equations can be a computational slog, especially for complex materials.
MIT researchers have developed a technique to quickly determine certain properties of a material, like stress and strain, based on an image of the material showing its internal structure. The approach could one day eliminate the need for arduous physics-based calculations, instead relying on computer vision and machine learning to generate estimates in real time.
The researchers say the advance could enable faster design prototyping and material inspections. “It’s a brand new approach,” says Zhenze Yang, adding that the algorithm “completes the whole process without any domain knowledge of physics.”
The research appears today in the journal Science Advances. Yang is the paper’s lead author and a PhD student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Co-authors include former MIT postdoc Chi-Hua Yu and Markus Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering and the director of the Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics.
Engineers spend lots of time solving equations. They help reveal a material’s internal forces, like stress and strain, which can cause that material to deform or break. Such calculations might suggest how a proposed bridge would hold up amid heavy traffic loads or high winds. Unlike Sir Isaac, engineers today don’t need pen and paper for the task. “Many generations of mathematicians and engineers have written down these equations and then figured out how to solve them on computers,” says Buehler. “But it’s still a tough problem. It’s very expensive — it can take days, weeks, or even months to run some simulations. So, we thought: Let’s teach an AI to do this problem for you.”
The researchers turned to a machine learning technique called a Generative Adversarial
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