Physics-Guided Fully Convolutional Spatiotemporal Learning Toward Digital-Twin-Enabled Microstructure Evolution Prediction

Understanding and predicting microstructure evolution is central to materials design, yet purely data-driven spatiotemporal learning models often suffer from limited physical consistency and degraded long-term prediction accuracy. In this work, we introduce a physics-guided fully convolutional spatiotemporal learning framework for microstructure evolution prediction. Unlike prior self-supervised approaches, the proposed method explicitly incorporates governing physical equations into the training objective, thereby encouraging the learned dynamics to remain consistent with known thermodynamic and kinetic laws. This physics-guided formulation improves predictive accuracy, long-horizon stability, and robustness across spatial resolutions and temporal prediction settings. Extensive experiments for spinodal decomposition demonstrate that incorporating physics-guided residual regularization leads to more faithful reproduction of microstructural morphology, statistics, and evolution trends compared with purely data-driven baselines. The proposed framework preserves the scalability and computational efficiency of fully convolutional architectures while bridging the gap between high-fidelity physics-based simulations and data-driven surrogate modeling, offering a reliable and efficient surrogate-modeling step toward digital-twin-enabled microstructure evolution prediction.

Fully Convolutional Spatiotemporal Learning for Microstructure Evolution Prediction

Understanding and predicting microstructure evolution is fundamental to materials science, as it governs the resulting properties and performance of materials. Traditional simulation methods, such as phase-field models, offer high-fidelity results but are computationally expensive due to the need to solve complex partial differential equations at fine spatiotemporal resolutions. To address this challenge, we propose a deep learning-based framework that accelerates microstructure evolution predictions while maintaining high accuracy. Our approach utilizes a fully convolutional spatiotemporal model trained in a self-supervised manner using sequential images generated from simulations of microstructural processes, including grain growth and spinodal decomposition. The trained neural network effectively learns the underlying physical dynamics and can accurately capture both short-term local behaviors and long-term statistical properties of evolving microstructures, while also demonstrating generalization to unseen spatiotemporal domains and variations in configuration and material parameters. Compared to recurrent neural architectures, our model achieves state-of-the-art predictive performance with significantly reduced computational cost in both training and inference. This work establishes a robust baseline for spatiotemporal learning in materials science and offers a scalable, data-driven alternative for fast and reliable microstructure simulations.