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Sandip R. Thorat,
Bhushan S. Chaudhari,
Sharad Ninu Kolte,
Amit V. Mohod,
Dipesh B. Pardeshi,
Atul A. Barhate,
P. William,
- Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sanjivani College of Engineering, Kopargaon, Maharashtra, India
- Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology, Pimpri Chinchwad University, Pune, Maharashtra, India
- Lecturer, Department of Electrical Engineering, Prof. Ram Meghe college of Engineering and Management, Badnera, Maharashtra, India
- Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, Prof. Ram Meghe college of Engineering and Management, Badnera, Maharashtra, India
- Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, Sanjivani College of Engineering, Kopargaon, Maharashtra, India
- Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, Godavari College of Engineering, Jalgaon, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Technological University, Lonere, Maharashtra, India
- Professor (Research), School of Computer Science and Technology, Karunya Institute of Technology and Sciences, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India
Abstract
The growing need for light-weight, high strength, and sustainable polymer composites has led to the development of smart methods that enable accurate structural-property quantification and material design. However, conventional methods have been predominantly data-based, thus ignoring physical constraints as well as multi-scale interactions involving fiber, matrix, interface, and process parameters, leading to lower accuracy and poor robustness and interpretability of the models. In this study, a Cat Swarm Optimization-Tuned Physics-Informed Multi-Scale Intelligent Random Forest (CSO-PIM-IntRF) model is introduced to predict the mechanical properties of natural fiber-reinforced polymer composites. The approach involves a dataset of natural fiber-reinforced polymers with 15,000 samples, where each sample has different composition, reinforcement features, surface treatment, process parameters, interfacial property, and mechanical property. Bootstrap sampling has been used to increase data variability to boost model robustness and Min-Max normalization to standardize feature distribution to ensure consistent learning. Multi-scale features are derived through Principal Component Analysis (PCA), which is then combined with physics-informed features including fiber volume fraction, density, rule-of-mixtures, and fiber-matrix interface. CSO optimizes the parameters of the IntRF to enhance the learning process of non-linear structure-property relationship. It has been shown experimentally that the presented CSO-PIM-IntRF framework successfully predicts the properties of polymer composites, giving the following root mean square error (RMSE): 1.1937 MPa for tensile strength and 3.4267 MPa for flexural strength with corresponding coefficients of determination (R2): 0.9826 for flexural strength and 0.9874 for tensile strength.
Keywords: Physics-informed machine learning; Multiscale modeling; Polymer composites; Structure–property quantification; Natural fiber-reinforced composites.
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Journal of Polymer & Composites
| Volume | 14 | |
| 04 | ||
| Received | 12/08/2026 | |
| Accepted | 27/08/2026 | |
| Published | 10/09/2026 | |
| Publication Time | 29 Days |