Identification of isotropic and orthotropic constitutive parameters by FEA-free energy-based inverse characterization method

In this paper, identification of isotropic and orthotropic linear elastic material constitutive parameters has been demonstrated by a FEA-free energy-based inverse analysis method. An important feature of the proposed method is that it requires no finite element (FE) simulation of the tested material. Full-field displacements calculated using digital image correlation (DIC) are used to compute DIC stress fields enforcing the equilibrium condition and DIC strain fields using interpolation functions. Boundary tractions and displacements are implicitly recast into an objective function that measures the energy residual of external work and internal elastic strain energy. The energy conservation principle states that the residual should be zero, and so minimizing this objective function inversely identifies the constitutive parameters. Synthetic data from simulated testing of isotropic materials and orthotropic composite materials under 2D plane stress conditions are used for verification of the proposed method. When identifying the constitutive parameters, it is beneficial to apply loadings in multiple directions, and in ways that create non-uniform stress distributions. The sensitivity of the parameter identification method to noise in both the measured full-field DIC displacements and loadings has been investigated.