Material parameter identification of unidirectional fiber-reinforced composites

In this article, several aspects of material parameter identification are addressed. We compare several methods to identify material parameters of a constitutive model for small strain, linear elastic transverse isotropy based on experimental data of specimens made from composite plates. These approaches range from identifying the five material parameters from purely analytical considerations to the fully numerical identification on the basis of finite elements and various data provided by digital image correlation (DIC). The underlying experimental tests range from purely uniaxial tensile tests with varying fiber orientation to shear and compression tests. A specific measuring instrument has been developed for the latter tests to obtain unique material parameters—motivated by the concept of local identifiability. Besides, we compare the numerical differentiation, which is the common procedure in parameter identification, with the fully analytical derivation of sensitivities within the DIC/FEM approach.