Prediction of Composite Mechanical Properties: Integration of Deep Neural Network Methods and Finite Element Analysis

Extracting the mechanical properties of a composite hydrogel; e.g., bioglass (BG)–collagen (COL), is often difficult due to the complexity of the experimental procedure. BGs could be embedded in the COL and thereby improve the mechanical properties of COL for bone tissue engineering applications. This paper proposed a deep-learning-based approach to extract the mechanical properties of a composite hydrogel directly from the microstructural images. Four datasets of various shapes of BGs (9000 2D images) generated by a finite element analysis showed that the deep neural network (DNN) model could efficiently predict the mechanical properties of the composite hydrogel, including the Young’s modulus and Poisson’s ratio. ResNet and AlexNet architecture were tuned to ensure the excellent performance and high accuracy of the proposed methods with R-values greater than 0.99 and a mean absolute error of the prediction of less than 7%. The results for the full dataset revealed that AlexNet had a better performance than ResNet in predicting the elastic material properties of BGs-COL with R-values of 0.99 and 0.97 compared to 0.97 and 0.96 for the Young’s modulus and Poisson’s ratio, respectively. This work provided bridging methods to combine a finite element analysis and a DNN for applications in diverse fields such as tissue engineering, materials science, and medical engineering.