Identification of material parameters and traction field for soft bodies in contact

Abstract

We provide an optimization framework that is capable of identifying the material parameters and contact traction field from two measured deformed geometries of a soft body in contact. The novelty of the framework is the idea of parametrizing the missing contact traction field and incorporating it into the inverse+forward hyper-elasticity formulation. We provide the continuum- and finite element formulation of the framework, as well as the direct differentiation method of sensitivity analysis to efficiently obtain necessary gradients for the BFGS optimizer. The correctness of the formulation and the excellent performance of the framework are confirmed by a series of benchmark numerical examples.