Fast phase prediction of charged polymer blends by white-box machine learning surrogates

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Ellis, Clayton, Fang, Xinyi, Balzer, Christopher, Quah, Timothy, Shell, M. Scott, Fredrickson, Glenn H., Gu, Mengyang
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Ellis, Clayton
Fang, Xinyi
Balzer, Christopher
Quah, Timothy
Shell, M. Scott
Fredrickson, Glenn H.
Gu, Mengyang
author_facet Ellis, Clayton
Fang, Xinyi
Balzer, Christopher
Quah, Timothy
Shell, M. Scott
Fredrickson, Glenn H.
Gu, Mengyang
contents Compatibilized polymer blends are a complex, yet versatile and widespread category of material. When the components of a binary blend are immiscible, they are typically driven towards a macrophase-separated state, but with the introduction of electrostatic interactions, they can be either homogenized or shifted to microphase separation. However, both experimental and simulation approaches face significant challenges in efficiently exploring the vast design space of charge-compatibilized polymer blends, encompassing chemical interactions, architectural properties, and composition. In this work, we introduce a white-box machine learning approach integrated with polymer field theory to predict the phase behavior of these systems, which is significantly more accurate than conventional black-box machine learning approaches. The random phase approximation (RPA) calculation is used as a testbed to determine polymer phases. Instead of directly predicting the polymer phase output of RPA calculations from a large input space by a machine learning model, we build a parallel partial Gaussian process model to predict the most computationally intensive component of the RPA calculation that only involves polymer architecture parameters as inputs. This approach substantially reduces the computational cost of the RPA calculation across a vast input space with nearly 100% accuracy for out-of-sample prediction, enabling rapid screening of polymer blend charge-compatibilization designs. More broadly, the white-box machine learning strategy offers a promising approach for dramatic acceleration of polymer field-theoretic methods for mapping out polymer phase behavior.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_07164
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fast phase prediction of charged polymer blends by white-box machine learning surrogates
Ellis, Clayton
Fang, Xinyi
Balzer, Christopher
Quah, Timothy
Shell, M. Scott
Fredrickson, Glenn H.
Gu, Mengyang
Soft Condensed Matter
Applications
Compatibilized polymer blends are a complex, yet versatile and widespread category of material. When the components of a binary blend are immiscible, they are typically driven towards a macrophase-separated state, but with the introduction of electrostatic interactions, they can be either homogenized or shifted to microphase separation. However, both experimental and simulation approaches face significant challenges in efficiently exploring the vast design space of charge-compatibilized polymer blends, encompassing chemical interactions, architectural properties, and composition. In this work, we introduce a white-box machine learning approach integrated with polymer field theory to predict the phase behavior of these systems, which is significantly more accurate than conventional black-box machine learning approaches. The random phase approximation (RPA) calculation is used as a testbed to determine polymer phases. Instead of directly predicting the polymer phase output of RPA calculations from a large input space by a machine learning model, we build a parallel partial Gaussian process model to predict the most computationally intensive component of the RPA calculation that only involves polymer architecture parameters as inputs. This approach substantially reduces the computational cost of the RPA calculation across a vast input space with nearly 100% accuracy for out-of-sample prediction, enabling rapid screening of polymer blend charge-compatibilization designs. More broadly, the white-box machine learning strategy offers a promising approach for dramatic acceleration of polymer field-theoretic methods for mapping out polymer phase behavior.
title Fast phase prediction of charged polymer blends by white-box machine learning surrogates
topic Soft Condensed Matter
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07164