How Can Large Language Models Help Humans in Design and Manufacturing?

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), including GPT-4, provides exciting new opportunities for generative design. We investigate the application of this tool across the entire design and manufacturing workflow. Specifically, we scrutinize the utility of LLMs in tasks such as: converting a text-based prompt into a design specification, transforming a design into manufacturing instructions, producing a design space and design variations, computing the performance of a design, and searching for designs predicated on performance. Through a series of examples, we highlight both the benefits and the limitations of the current LLMs. By exposing these limitations, we aspire to catalyze the continued improvement and progression of these models.

Learning Neural Constitutive Laws From Motion Observations for Generalizable PDE Dynamics

We propose a hybrid neural network (NN) and PDE approach for learning generalizable PDE dynamics from motion observations. Many NN approaches learn an end-to-end model that implicitly models both the governing PDE and constitutive models (or material models). Without explicit PDE knowledge, these approaches cannot guarantee physical correctness and have limited generalizability. We argue that the governing PDEs are often well-known and should be explicitly enforced rather than learned. Instead, constitutive models are particularly suitable for learning due to their data-fitting nature. To this end, we introduce a new framework termed "Neural Constitutive Laws" (NCLaw), which utilizes a network architecture that strictly guarantees standard constitutive priors, including rotation equivariance and undeformed state equilibrium. We embed this network inside a differentiable simulation and train the model by minimizing a loss function based on the difference between the simulation and the motion observation. We validate NCLaw on various large-deformation dynamical systems, ranging from solids to fluids. After training on a single motion trajectory, our method generalizes to new geometries, initial/boundary conditions, temporal ranges, and even multi-physics systems. On these extremely out-of-distribution generalization tasks, NCLaw is orders-of-magnitude more accurate than previous NN approaches. Real-world experiments demonstrate our method's ability to learn constitutive laws from videos.

Computational Discovery of Microstructured Composites with Optimal Strength-Toughness Trade-Offs

The conflict between strength and toughness is a fundamental problem in engineering materials design. However, systematic discovery of microstructured composites with optimal strength-toughness trade-offs has never been demonstrated due to the discrepancies between simulation and reality and the lack of data-efficient exploration of the entire Pareto front. Here, we report a widely applicable pipeline harnessing physical experiments, numerical simulations, and artificial neural networks to efficiently discover microstructured designs that are simultaneously tough and strong. Using a physics-based simulator with moderate complexity, our strategy runs a data-driven proposal-validation workflow in a nested-loop fashion to bridge the gap between simulation and reality in high sample efficiency. Without any prescribed expert knowledge of materials design, our approach automatically identifies existing toughness enhancement mechanisms that were traditionally discovered through trial-and-error or biomimicry. We provide a blueprint for the computational discovery of optimal designs, which inverts traditional scientific approaches, and is applicable to a wide range of research problems beyond composites, including polymer chemistry, fluid dynamics, meteorology, and robotics.