Determination of material parameters of isotropic and anisotropic hyper-elastic materials using boundary measured data

Abstract

Identification of mechanical properties of isotropic and anisotropic materials that demonstrate non-linear elastic behavior, such as rubbers and soft tissues of human body, is critical for many industrial and medical purposes. In this paper, a method is presented to obtain the mechanical constants of Mooney-Rivlin and Holzapfel hyper-elastic material models which are employed to describe the behavior of isotropic and anisotropic hyper-elastic materials, respectively. By using boundary measured data from a sample with non-standard geometry, and by using an iterative inverse analysis technique, the material constants are obtained. The method uses the results of different experiments simultaneously to obtain the material parameters more accurately. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through three examples. In the two first examples, the simulated measured data are used, while in the third example, the experimental data obtained from a polyvinyl alcohol sample are used.