Moving Morphable Inclusion Approach: An Explicit Framework to Solve Inverse Problem in Elasticity

Abstract

Abstract In this work, we present a novel inverse approach to characterize the nonhomogeneous mechanical behavior of linear elastic solids. In this approach, we optimize the geometric parameters and shear modulus values of the predefined moving morphable inclusions (MMIs) to solve the inverse problem. Thereby, the total number of the optimization parameters is remarkably reduced compared with the conventional iterative inverse algorithms to identify the nonhomogeneous shear modulus distribution of solids. The proposed inverse approach is tested by multiple numerical examples, and we observe that this approach is capable of preserving the shape and the shear moduli of the inclusions well. In particular, this inverse approach performs well even without any regularization when the noise level is not very high. Overall, the proposed approach provides a new paradigm to solve the inverse problem in elasticity and has potential of addressing the issue of computational inefficacy existing in the conventional inverse approaches.