2025-04-09 09:00:00
Brad L. Boyce
Senior Scientist
Sandia National Laboratories
“Microstructural Black Swans and Deep Material Fingerprints”
Abstract: Black swans are a metaphor for rare events with extreme consequences. In the domain of structural materials, black swans represent features in the microstructure that lead to catastrophic failure; as a result of their rarity, they are difficult to observe and often overlooked. These unusual weakest-link features are described variously as incipient, emergent, or anomalous. They give rise to localization, percolation, or avalanche events such as fracture, ductile rupture, dielectric breakdown, corrosion pit nucleation, and fatigue-crack initiation; as such, they are limiting cases in the concept of a representative volume. In this perspective, three examples are given of rare microstructural features and how they limit the mechanical reliability of structural metals. After taking stock of these examples, a future outlook considers the benefits enabled by high-throughput testing. Looking beyond anomaly detection, these high-throughput methods can be applied to a suite of characterization methods. We develop a set of high-throughput multimodal workflows that enable a ‘deep fingerprint’: high-dimensional representations of material process, structure, and properties. Novel algorithms like physics-informed multimodal autoencoders enable unsupervised learning of these large data cubes. The learned latent representation enables cluster disentanglement and cross-modal inference – such novel approaches to materials informatics may offer a new path for anomaly detection, mechanistic discovery and even process control.
SNL is managed and operated by NTESS under DOE NNSA contract DE-NA0003525.
BIO: Dr. Boyce is a Senior Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories. Dr. Boyce received the B.S. degree from Michigan Technological University in 1996 in Metallurgical Engineering and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1998 and 2001 from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Boyce joined the technical staff at Sandia in 2001 where his research interests lie in micromechanisms of deformation and failure. He has published over 180 peer reviewed articles and holds 6 U.S. patents on topics such as microsystems reliability, nanoindentation, fracture in structural alloys, weld metallurgy, and fatigue mechanisms. Dr. Boyce is a past recipient of the Hertz Foundation fellowship, the J. Keith Brimacombe Medal, and the Marcus A. Grossman Young Author award. He is also president of TMS, The Minerals, Metals, and Materials society.
