Journal of Soft Computing and Information Technology

Journal of Soft Computing and Information Technology

Predicting Dielectric Constants of Nanomaterials Using Graph Neural Networks: Integrating Molecular Dynamics and Machine Learning

Document Type : Persian Original Article

Author
Department of Physics, Materials and Energy Research Center, Dez.Co. ,Islamic Azad University, Dezful. Iran
Abstract
In this study, an efficient and accurate framework based on a Graph Neural Network (GNN) is developed to predict the dielectric constants of nanomaterials, significantly reducing computational cost. The proposed model is trained on data derived from Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations using LAMMPS and Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations. The training dataset consists of dielectric constant values for molecular structures of TiO₂, SiO₂, H₂O, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), graphene oxide, and carbon nanotubes under various temperature (300–500 K) and pressure (0.1 MPa–10 GPa) conditions. The GNN model achieves high prediction accuracy with a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.12 and a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.08, while reducing prediction time to 0.5 seconds. Results show that substituting 10 copper (Cu) atoms into the TiO₂ structure enhances its dielectric constant by 20%, attributed to heterogeneous charge distribution and stronger dipole formation. Additionally, shortening the H–O bond length in water from 1.5 Å to 1.0 Å increases the dielectric constant by 15%. Sensitivity analysis and interpretability techniques such as Grad-CAM identify key structural features—including Cu and Ti atoms, bond lengths, and bond types—as critical factors influencing dielectric properties. Comparisons with traditional methods like Support Vector Machine (SVM) and linear regression confirm the superior accuracy and efficiency of the GNN model.
Keywords

[1] S. Chmiela, A. Tkatchenko, H. E. Sauceda, I. Poltavsky, K. R. Müller, and A. Tkatchenko, "Machine learning of accurate energy-conserving molecular force fields," Science Advances, vol. 4, no. 1, eaao5751, 2018, doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1603015.
[2] T. Xie and J. C. Grossman, "Crystal graph convolutional neural networks for an accurate and interpretable prediction of material properties," Physical Review Letters, vol. 120, no. 14, p. 145301, 2018, doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.145301.
[3] U. Unke, O. T., and M. Meuwly, "PhysNet: A neural network for predicting energies, forces, dipole moments, and partial charges," Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 3678-3693, Jun. 2019.
[4] W. Nash, T. Drummond, and N. Birbilis, "A review of deep learning in the study of materials degradation," npj Materials Degradation, vol. 2, no. 1, p. 37, 2018.
[5] J. Gilmer, S. S. Schoenholz, P. F. Riley, O. Vinyals, and G. E. Dahl, "Neural message passing for quantum chemistry," International Conference on Machine Learning, 2017, pp. 1263-1272.
[6] K. T. Schütt, P. Kessel, M. Gastegger, K. A. Nicoli, A. Tkatchenko, and K. R. Müller, "SchNetPack: A deep learning toolbox for atomistic systems," Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 448-455, 2018.
[7] S. Plimpton, "Fast parallel algorithms for short-range molecular dynamics," Journal of Computational Physics, vol. 117, no. 1, pp. 1-19, 1995.
[8] T. P. Senftle, S. Hong, M. M. Islam, S. B. Kylasa, Y. Zheng, Y. K. Shin, and A. C. Van Duin, "The ReaxFF reactive force-field: development, applications and future directions," npj Computational Materials, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1-14, 2016.
[9] G. Kresse and J. Furthmüller, "Efficiency of ab-initio total energy calculations for metals and semiconductors using a plane-wave basis set," Computational Materials Science, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 15-50, 1996.
[10] A. P. Bartók, M. C. Payne, R. Kondor, and G. Csányi, "Gaussian approximation potentials: The accuracy of quantum mechanics, without the electrons," Physical Review Letters, vol. 104, no. 13, p. 136403, 2010.
[11] J. S. Smith, O. Isayev, and A. E. Roitberg, "ANI-1: an extensible neural network potential with DFT accuracy at force field computational cost," Chemical Science, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 3192-3203, 2017.
[12] J. Zhou, G. Cui, S. Hu, Z. Zhang, C. Yang, Z. Liu, and M. Sun, "Graph neural networks: A review of methods and applications," AI Open, vol. 1, pp. 57-81, 2020.
[13] A. Jain, S. P. Ong, G. Hautier, W. Chen, W. D. Richards, S. Dacek, and K. A. Persson, "Commentary: The Materials Project: A materials genome approach to accelerating materials innovation," APL Materials, vol. 1, no. 1, 2013.