Deep-learning-enhanced digital twinning of complex composite structures and real-time mechanical interaction

Digital twins are undergoing growth that enables highly informative and scaleable interaction between physical objects and virtual twins, which is of great significance to the life cycle analysis of composites. Real-time fine evolution is challenging due to vast combinations of input features and high-resolution calculated variables. Here, we systematically demonstrate an AI-based methodology for digital twinning of complex composite structures. First, three types of deep neural networks are created with optionally used autoencoders as surrogate models, with architectures and data processing inspired by the rule-of-mixture of composites. Second, the prediction accuracy and efficiency are evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively, demonstrating the feasibility of predicting 3D displacement and stress fields directly from sensing data of temperature, pressure and loading displacement, and the optimal architecture is selected to be the evolving digital twin. Finally, the real-time interactive experiments are relayed to the digital twin and demonstrated that it can interact with physical objects and evolve online with high accuracy. These results indicate that the computational time can be reduced by 3∼6 orders of magnitude with high information intensity and scalability compared with conventional numerical and experimental methods, which opens up the avenues for the cost-effective and efficient development of digital twin services for composites.