Artificial Neural Networks-Based Material Parameter Identification for Numerical Simulations of Additively Manufactured Parts by Material Extrusion

To be able to use finite element (FE) simulations in structural component development, experimental investigations for the characterization of the material properties are required to subsequently calibrate suitable material cards. In contrast to the commonly used computational and time-consuming method of parameter identification (PI) by using analytical and numerical optimizations with internal or commercial software, a more time-efficient method based on machine learning (ML) is presented. This method is applied to simulate the material behavior of additively manufactured specimens made of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) under uniaxial stress in a structural simulation. By using feedforward artificial neural networks (FFANN) for the ML-based direct inverse PI process, various investigations were carried out on the influence of sampling strategies, data quantity and data preparation on the prediction accuracy of the NN. Furthermore, the results of hyperparameter (HP) search methods are presented and discussed and their influence on the prediction quality of the FFANN are critically evaluated. The investigations show that the NN-based method is applicable to the present use case and results in material parameters that lead to a lower error between experimental and calculated force-displacement curves than the commonly used optimization-based method.