Multiscale Identification of Material Properties for Anisotropic Media: A General Inverse Approach

Abstract

This work deals with the problem of characterizing the material properties of a composite plate, made of unidirectional fiber-reinforced laminae, at each pertinent scale (microscopic and mesoscopic ones). The characterization is achieved through a single non-destructive harmonic test performed at the macroscopic scale of the specimen. A general multi-scale identification strategy (MSIS) is proposed to accomplish this goal. The multi-scale identification problem is split into two interdependent sub-problems which are stated, at both levels, as constrained minimization problems. At the first level the lamina properties are retrieved by minimizing the distance between the numerical and the reference harmonic responses of the multilayer plate. Conversely, the second-level problem aims at characterizing fiber and matrix elastic properties by exploiting the results of the first step. The whole procedure is based on a special global hybrid optimization algorithm and on the strain energy homogenization method of periodic media as well. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated through a meaningful numerical benchmark.