Learning the macroscopic flow model of short fiber suspensions from fine-scale simulated data

Abstract

Fiber-fiber interaction plays an important role in the evolution of fiber orientation in semi-concentrated suspensions. Flow induced orientation in short-fiber reinforced composites determines the anisotropic properties of manufactured parts and consequently their performances. In the case of dilute suspensions, the orientation evolution can be accurately described by using the Jeffery model; however, as soon as the fiber concentration increases, fiber-fiber interactions cannot be ignored anymore and the final orientation state strongly depends on the modeling of those interactions. First modeling frameworks described these interactions from a diffusion mechanism; however, it was necessary to consider richer descriptions (anisotropic diffusion, etc.) to address experimental observations. Even if different proposals were considered, none of them seem general and accurate enough. In this paper we do not address a new proposal of a fiber interaction model, but a data-driven methodology able to enrich existing models from data, that in our case comes from a direct numerical simulation of well resolved microscopic physics.