Listen to the playback here of the December 6 webinar featuring Dr. Ellen Kuhl from Stanford University and Dr. Mathias Peirlinck from Delft University of Technology entitled, Democratizing Engineering Analysis Through a Universal Material Subroutine.  A short abstract for the webinar follows below and here is a link to the open access publication in which much more detail can be found including all of the files required to exercise this new technology.

We encourage you to post comments, questions, and feedback you have including those related to your own usage of the technology by replying to this post for follow up by the presenters.  Also, be on the lookout for a part 2 of this webinar coming in the future.

Abstract:

Constitutive modeling is the cornerstone of continuum and structural mechanics. In a finite element analysis, the constitutive model is encoded in the material subroutine, providing the functional map between strains and stresses in the governing equations. This function is called within every finite element, at each integration point, within every time step, at each Newton iteration. Today’s finite element analysis packages offer large libraries of material models to choose from. However, the scientific criteria for appropriate model selection remain highly subjective and prone to user bias. Here we show how to fully automate the process of model selection, autonomously discover the best model and parameters from experimental data, encode all possible discoverable models into a single material subroutine, and seamlessly integrate this universal material subroutine into finite element simulations. We have successfully prototyped this technology for various incompressible, isotropic, hyperelastic materials and, recently, further expanded it towards both compressible and anisotropic material behavior. We demonstrate how to collectively integrate these features into a single universal material subroutine that will be made available as a build-in material modeling feature in future Abaqus releases. Finite element simulations with this novel universal material subroutine show that it specializes well to traditional constitutive models, generalizes well to newly discovered models, and agrees excellently with both experimental data and previous simulations. Replacing dozens of individual material subroutines by a single universal material subroutine that is populated directly via automated model discovery, entirely without human interaction, will democratize engineering analysis and make finite element simulations more accessible to a more inclusive and diverse community to accelerate scientific innovation.