Accelerating Multiscale Materials Modeling with Machine Learning

Abstract

The focus of this project is to accelerate and transform the workflow of multiscale materials modeling by developing an integrated toolchain seamlessly combining DFT, SNAP, LAMMPS, (shown in Figure 1-1) and a machine-learning (ML) model that will more efficiently extract information from a smaller set of first-principles calculations. Our ML model enables us to accelerate first-principles data generation by interpolating existing high fidelity data, and extend the simulation scale by extrapolating high fidelity data (10 2 atoms) to the mesoscale (10 4 atoms). It encodes the underlying physics of atomic interactions on the microscopic scale by adapting a variety of ML techniques such as deep neural networks (DNNs), and graph neural networks (GNNs). We developed a new surrogate model for density functional theory using deep neural networks. The developed ML surrogate is demonstrated in a workflow to generate accurate band energies, total energies, and density of the 298K and 933K Aluminum systems. Furthermore, the models can be used to predict the quantities of interest for systems with more number of atoms than the training data set. We have demonstrated that the ML model can be used to compute the quantities of interest for systems with 100,000 Al atoms. When compared with 2000 Al system the new surrogate model is as accurate as DFT, but three orders of magnitude faster. We also explored optimal experimental design techniques to choose the training data and novel Graph Neural Networks to train on smaller data sets. These are promising methods that need to be explored in the future.