Optimization of Thermal Conductance at Interfaces Using Machine Learning Algorithms.

Optimization of thermal transport across the interface of two different materials is critical to micro-/nanoscale electronic, photonic, and phononic devices. Although several examples of compositional intermixing at the interfaces having a positive effect on interfacial thermal conductance (ITC) have been reported, an optimum arrangement has not yet been determined because of the large number of potential atomic configurations and the significant computational cost of evaluation. On the other hand, computation-driven materials design efforts are rising in popularity and importance. Yet, the scalability and transferability of machine learning models remain as challenges in creating a complete pipeline for the simulation and analysis of large molecular systems. In this work we present a scalable Bayesian optimization framework, which leverages dynamic spawning of jobs through the Message Passing Interface (MPI) to run multiple parallel molecular dynamics simulations within a parent MPI job to optimize heat transfer at the silicon and aluminum (Si/Al) interface. We found a maximum of 50% increase in the ITC when introducing a two-layer intermixed region that consists of a higher percentage of Si. Because of the random nature of the intermixing, the magnitude of increase in the ITC varies. We observed that both homogeneity/heterogeneity of the intermixing and the intrinsic stochastic nature of molecular dynamics simulations account for the variance in ITC.

A look inside the black box: Using graph-theoretical descriptors to interpret a Continuous-Filter Convolutional Neural Network (CF-CNN) trained on the global and local minimum energy structures of neutral water clusters.

We describe a method for the post-hoc interpretation of a neural network (NN) trained on the global and local minima of neutral water clusters. We use the structures recently reported in a newly published database containing over 5 × 106 unique water cluster networks (H2O)N of size N = 3-30. The structural properties were first characterized using chemical descriptors derived from graph theory, identifying important trends in topology, connectivity, and polygon structure of the networks associated with the various minima. The code to generate the molecular graphs and compute the descriptors is available at https://github.com/exalearn/molecular-graph-descriptors, and the graphs are available alongside the original database at https://sites.uw.edu/wdbase/. A Continuous-Filter Convolutional Neural Network (CF-CNN) was trained on a subset of 500 000 networks to predict the potential energy, yielding a mean absolute error of 0.002 ± 0.002 kcal/mol per water molecule. Clusters of sizes not included in the training set exhibited errors of the same magnitude, indicating that the CF-CNN protocol accurately predicts energies of networks for both smaller and larger sizes than those used during training. The graph-theoretical descriptors were further employed to interpret the predictive power of the CF-CNN. Topological measures, such as the Wiener index, the average shortest path length, and the similarity index, suggested that all networks from the test set were within the range of values as the ones from the training set. The graph analysis suggests that larger errors appear when the mean degree and the number of polygons in the cluster lie further from the mean of the training set. This indicates that the structural space, and not just the chemical space, is an important factor to consider when designing training sets, as predictive errors can result when the structural composition is sufficiently different from the bulk of those in the training set. To this end, the developed descriptors are quite effective in explaining the results of the CF-CNN (a.k.a. the "black box") model.

Tracking the Chemical Evolution of Iodine Species Using Recurrent Neural Networks.

We apply recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to predict the time evolution of the concentration profile of multiple species resulting from a set of interconnected chemical reactions. As a proof of concept of our approach, RNNs were trained on a synthetic dataset generated by solving the kinetic equations of a system of aqueous inorganic iodine reactions that can follow after nuclear reactor accidents. We examine the minimum dataset necessary to obtain accurate predictions and explore the ability of RNNs to interpolate and extrapolate when exposed to previously unseen data. We also investigate the limits of our RNN by evaluating the robustness of the training initialization on our dataset.