Identification of Mechanical Properties by Displacement Field Measurement: A Variational Approach

We study a parameter identification problem associated with a two-dimensional mechanical problem. In the first part, the experimental technique of determining the displacement field is briefly presented. The variational method proposed herein is based on the minimization of either a separately convex functional or a convex functional that leads to the reconstruction of the elastic tensor and the stress field. These two reconstructed fields are continuous and piecewise linear on a triangulation of the two-dimensional domain. Some numerical and experimental examples are presented to test the performance of the algorithms.