Date: Thursday, October 29, 2009 4:30 PM
Location: 162 Hollister
The concept of error in constitutive equation (ECE), initially introduced for solid mechanics by P. Ladeveze in the early 80s, has proved very fruitful for addressing two important issues in computational mechanics:
(a) definition and computation of error estimators for the FEM
(b) identification of constitutive parameters or properties
The main motivation behind the ECE concept is to define objective functions that directly reflect a possible mismatch between kinematic and static fields. Such mismatch may result from (a) discretization errors, or (b) improperly known constitutive or structural properties. In addition to having a clear physical meaning directly related to the identification problem at hand, ECE-based functional also turn out to perform well and to be very flexible in terms of accommodating available data. In this presentation, which will focus on the latter issue (b), we will present an overview of the concepts, formulations and applications to identification problems of objective functions based on the ECE, and survey various developments around the ECE concept since its inception.
