Nonlinear material parameter estimation for characterizing hyper elastic large strain models

An automated, systematic, and computationally efficient methodology to estimate the material parameters for characterizing general nonlinear material models for large strain analysis (e.g., hyperelastic and hyper foam materials) is presented. Such constitutive material models often require a large number of material constants to describe a host of physical phenomena and complicated deformation mechanisms. Extracting such material constants for a model from the volumes of data generated in the test laboratory is usually a very difficult, and frustrating. The integrated code COMPARE (that is an acronym of Constitutive Material PARameter Estimator) is being developed to enable the determination of an “optimum” set material parameters by minimizing the errors between the experimental test data and the predicted response. The key ingredients of COMPARE are listed as follows: (i) primal analysis tools (response functionals) for differential form of constitutive models; (ii) sensitivity analysis; (iii) optimization technique of an error/cost function; and (iv) graphical user interface. The code COMPARE casts the estimation of the material parameters as a minimum-error, weighted-multiobjective, optimization problem. Detailed derivations and results generated by applying the proposed technique to a comprehensive set of test data are given. These results have clearly demonstrated the great practical utility of the automated scheme developed. Received 17 September 1999