When modeling microstructures, the computational resource requirements increase rapidly as the simulation domain becomes larger. As a result, simulating a small representative fraction under periodic boundary conditions is often a necessary simplification. However, the truncated structures leave nonphysical boundaries, which are detrimental to numerical modeling. Here, we propose a self-stitching algorithm for generating periodic structures, demonstrated in a grain structure. The main idea of our algorithm is to artificially add structural information between mismatched boundary pairs, using the hierarchical spatial predictions of the U-Net. The algorithm provides an automatic and unbiased way to obtain periodic boundaries in grain structures and can be applied to porous microstructures in a similar way.
@article{arxiv.2310.20379,
title = {A U-Net-Based Self-Stitching Method for Generating Periodic Grain Structures},
author = {Ye Ji and Arnd Koeppe and Patrick Altschuh and Lars Griem and Deepalaxmi Rajagopal and Britta Nestler and Weijin Chen and Yi Zhang and Yue Zheng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.20379},
year = {2023}
}