Inverse Problems in Experimental Mechanics

Abstract

The use of inverse solutions in experimental mechanics is not recent and many applications can be found in the literature. So, what is the reason for this special issue? The main motivation is that thanks to increasing computer power and fast development of advanced experimental techniques such as full-field deformation measurements, very large amounts of data can now be processed. As a result, novel experimental procedures are emerging, taking full advantage of the previous point. Whereas historically, inverse solutions were targeted at processing few data to extract information, generating strongly ill-posed problems that had to be addressed with advanced mathematical tools, the availability of much larger amounts of data through imaging technologies, for instance, has somewhat changed the profile of the problems to be solved. Noise filtering, for instance, has become a central issue, as illustrated in many of the papers published in this issue. Computing times can also be rather large because of the amount of data that needs processing, particularly when non-linear problems are to be solved and numerical optimization is important. Looking at the papers in the present issue, it is clear that a majority deals with the problem of extracting mechanical constitutive parameters of materials from full-field measurements and complex stress and strain states. There are several motivations for this, among which: