Combined Shape and Parameter Identification Applied to a Porous Media Simulation

Abstract

For material parameter estimation as well as shape identification a variety of research and commercial software exists. These tools are often integrated directly into an FEM program or use the FEM solver as a subroutine. However, the two problems are always considered as separate tasks which are solved by separate software packages. When simulating structured specimens, the considered domain often consists of different material types. These are modeled using different material domains. Frequently, the material parameters and the shape of the material domains are unknown. As both components considerably influence the simulation results, separate identification yields poor results. The inhouse identification and optimization software SPC-Opt developed at the department of Solid Mechanics at Chemnitz University of Technology is capable of solving shape and parameter identification simultaneously. Here, the key concept is an abstract formulation of parameters as variables that influence FEM computations. In this paper, the general design and algorithms are presented. Moreover, the application is demonstrated on an academic example using a simple porous media constitutive model.