Parameter identification for nonlinear elastic and viscoelastic plates

Parameter identification is studied in nonlinear elastic and viscoelastic plates by solving an inverse problem numerically. The material properties of the plate, which appear in the constitutive relations, are recovered by optimizing an objective function constructed from reference strain data. The resulting inverse algorithm consists of an optimization algorithm coupled with a corresponding direct algorithm that computes the strain fields given a set of material properties. Numerical results are presented for a variety of constitutive models; they indicate that the methodology works well even with noisy data. (c) 2005 IMACS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.