A Foundation Model for Material Fracture Prediction

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Marcato, Agnese, Pachalieva, Aleksandra, Hill, Ryley G., Gao, Kai, Wang, Xiaoyu, Rougier, Esteban, Lei, Zhou, Agrawal, Vinamra, Chua, Janel, Kang, Qinjun, Hyman, Jeffrey D., Hunter, Abigail, DeBardeleben, Nathan, Lawrence, Earl, Viswanathan, Hari, O'Malley, Daniel, Santos, Javier E.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911084782288896
author Marcato, Agnese
Pachalieva, Aleksandra
Hill, Ryley G.
Gao, Kai
Wang, Xiaoyu
Rougier, Esteban
Lei, Zhou
Agrawal, Vinamra
Chua, Janel
Kang, Qinjun
Hyman, Jeffrey D.
Hunter, Abigail
DeBardeleben, Nathan
Lawrence, Earl
Viswanathan, Hari
O'Malley, Daniel
Santos, Javier E.
author_facet Marcato, Agnese
Pachalieva, Aleksandra
Hill, Ryley G.
Gao, Kai
Wang, Xiaoyu
Rougier, Esteban
Lei, Zhou
Agrawal, Vinamra
Chua, Janel
Kang, Qinjun
Hyman, Jeffrey D.
Hunter, Abigail
DeBardeleben, Nathan
Lawrence, Earl
Viswanathan, Hari
O'Malley, Daniel
Santos, Javier E.
contents Accurately predicting when and how materials fail is critical to designing safe, reliable structures, mechanical systems, and engineered components that operate under stress. Yet, fracture behavior remains difficult to model across the diversity of materials, geometries, and loading conditions in real-world applications. While machine learning (ML) methods show promise, most models are trained on narrow datasets, lack robustness, and struggle to generalize. Meanwhile, physics-based simulators offer high-fidelity predictions but are fragmented across specialized methods and require substantial high-performance computing resources to explore the input space. To address these limitations, we present a data-driven foundation model for fracture prediction, a transformer-based architecture that operates across simulators, a wide range of materials (including plastic-bonded explosives, steel, aluminum, shale, and tungsten), and diverse loading conditions. The model supports both structured and unstructured meshes, combining them with large language model embeddings of textual input decks specifying material properties, boundary conditions, and solver settings. This multimodal input design enables flexible adaptation across simulation scenarios without changes to the model architecture. The trained model can be fine-tuned with minimal data on diverse downstream tasks, including time-to-failure estimation, modeling fracture evolution, and adapting to combined finite-discrete element method simulations. It also generalizes to unseen materials such as titanium and concrete, requiring as few as a single sample, dramatically reducing data needs compared to standard ML. Our results show that fracture prediction can be unified under a single model architecture, offering a scalable, extensible alternative to simulator-specific workflows.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_23077
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Foundation Model for Material Fracture Prediction
Marcato, Agnese
Pachalieva, Aleksandra
Hill, Ryley G.
Gao, Kai
Wang, Xiaoyu
Rougier, Esteban
Lei, Zhou
Agrawal, Vinamra
Chua, Janel
Kang, Qinjun
Hyman, Jeffrey D.
Hunter, Abigail
DeBardeleben, Nathan
Lawrence, Earl
Viswanathan, Hari
O'Malley, Daniel
Santos, Javier E.
Machine Learning
Materials Science
Geophysics
Accurately predicting when and how materials fail is critical to designing safe, reliable structures, mechanical systems, and engineered components that operate under stress. Yet, fracture behavior remains difficult to model across the diversity of materials, geometries, and loading conditions in real-world applications. While machine learning (ML) methods show promise, most models are trained on narrow datasets, lack robustness, and struggle to generalize. Meanwhile, physics-based simulators offer high-fidelity predictions but are fragmented across specialized methods and require substantial high-performance computing resources to explore the input space. To address these limitations, we present a data-driven foundation model for fracture prediction, a transformer-based architecture that operates across simulators, a wide range of materials (including plastic-bonded explosives, steel, aluminum, shale, and tungsten), and diverse loading conditions. The model supports both structured and unstructured meshes, combining them with large language model embeddings of textual input decks specifying material properties, boundary conditions, and solver settings. This multimodal input design enables flexible adaptation across simulation scenarios without changes to the model architecture. The trained model can be fine-tuned with minimal data on diverse downstream tasks, including time-to-failure estimation, modeling fracture evolution, and adapting to combined finite-discrete element method simulations. It also generalizes to unseen materials such as titanium and concrete, requiring as few as a single sample, dramatically reducing data needs compared to standard ML. Our results show that fracture prediction can be unified under a single model architecture, offering a scalable, extensible alternative to simulator-specific workflows.
title A Foundation Model for Material Fracture Prediction
topic Machine Learning
Materials Science
Geophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23077