A BEM BASED PATTERN SEARCH SOLUTION FOR A CLASS OF INVERSE ELASTOSTATIC PROBLEMS

A boundary element based solution, employing the Hooke-Jeeves pattern search method, is developed to determine internal cavity geometries in the inverse elastostatics problem. In contrast to existing methods wh ich employ gradient based solutions, the developed method does not req uire gradient information, and consequently results in a simpler solut ion procedure. A boundary difference function (BDF) that provides a gu ide for the initial guess is introduced. The unknown cavity geometry i s first assumed to be circular, and the algorithm is run until the gen eral location of the cavity is determined. Subsequent refinement of th e detected cavity geometry is affected using a periodic cubic spline d iscretization. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the effec tiveness of the boundary difference function and to demonstrate the su ccessful detection of the cavity. The effects of simulated experimenta l inputs with prescribed error are also presented. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.