Identifying Elastic Properties of Isotropic Materials by Finite Element Analyses and Vibration Data

The use of non destructive techniques for the elastic characterization of isotropic materials is continuously increasing and those based on the modal vibration testing of plate-like specimens is very widespread. In the present paper, an optimized search procedure is proposed which allows the material constants of isotropic plates to be non-destructively identified from vibration testing data and using finite element analyses. The identification process is performed by an optimizing algorithm in which the error function to be minimized depends on the difference between the natural frequencies obtained by finite element analyses and the measured ones. In order to verify the proposed identification procedure a comparison with the results reported in literature has been made.