Identification of Material Properties by Thermo-mechanical Test Results

This paper deals with the problem of identifying material parameters by measuring mechanical and/or thermal quantities. We propose different energy functions measuring the gap which exists between Analysis and Tests. They allow to compute indicators which will determine if a given set of experimentally obtained data is able to identify the desired thermal and/or mechanical material characteristics. These indicators are based on error measures on the constitutive relations. The so-called constitutive relations relate the load quantities (ie stress, heat flux vector) to the strain and/or temperature. These indicators measure the potentiel validity of the identification method in evaluating material parameters. The same functions in which the correction variables are introduced are also used to update the tensors associated with the material properties.