Rvesimulator: An Automated Representative Volume Element Simulator for Data-Driven Material Discovery

Abstract

The rvesimulator aims to provide a user-friendly, automated Python-based framework conducting Representative Volume Element (RVE) simulation via powerful Finite Element Method (FEM) software Abaqus. By utilizing this repository, large amount of reliable FEM data-set generation is possible with RVEs encompassing materials from elastic to plastic composites. rvesimulator provides: (1) a cross-platform function to run arbitrary Python-Abaqus script without graphical user interface (GUI), it offers users a convenience way to run their unique scripts; (2) Python-Abaqus scripts to simulate RVE with different design of experiments including various micro-structures, material laws, and loading; (3) benchmarks of running prevalent RVEs covering elastic, hyper-elastic, plastic materials are provided, which illustrates the general pipeline (preprocess, execution, and postprocess) of the developed framework. By sharing the developing framework, we are aiming to reduce the labor-intensive process of generating massive of simulations data for new materials and structure discovery. Therefore, it facilitates the application and development of machine learning method for new material discovery.