Modified Landweber tterations in a multilevel setting applied to the determination of nonlinear material parameters in piezoelectricity

An efficient solution of the inverse problem of identifying nonlinear dependencies in hyperbolic systems of PDEs, here piezoelectric material parameter curves, is the aim of this work. The dominant material tensor entries in the coupled field equations which describe the electromechanical interplay are approximated by functions depending on the physical field quantities electric field or mechanical stress. In order to solve this nonlinear and ill-posed problem of parameter curve identification efficiently, modified Landweber iterations (steepest descent and minimal error) will be studied. A multilevel approach is expedient due to the discretization of the unknown parameter curves and high computational efforts solving the forward problem (transient, nonlinear FEM computations). Theoretical investigations concerning convergence and regularization properties of the methods in a multilevel scenario will be presented, along with numerical results from an example in piezoelectricity. (© 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)