Approaches to accommodate noisy data in the direct solution of inverse problems in incompressible plane strain elasticity

Abstract

We apply the adjoint weighted equation method (AWE) to the direct solution of inverse problems of incompressible plane strain elasticity. We show that based on untreated noisy displacements, the reconstruction of the shear modulus can be very poor. We link this poor performance to loss of coercivity of the weak form when treating problems with discontinuous coefficients. We demonstrate that by smoothing the displacements and appending a regularization term to the AWE formulation, a dramatic improvement in the reconstruction can be achieved. With these improvements, the advantages of the AWE method as a direct solution approach can be extended to a wider range of problems.