Adaptive Finite Element Methods for the Identification of Elastic Constants

In this paper, the elastic constants of a material are recovered from measured displacements where the model is the equilibrium equations for the orthotropic case. The finite element method is used for the discretization of the state equation and the Gauss–Newton method is used to solve the nonlinear least squares problem attained from the parameter estimation problem. A posteriori error estimators are derived and used to improve the accuracy by an appropriate mesh refinement. A numerical experiment is presented to show the applicability of the approach.