Determination of elastic constants of materials by vibration testing

Vibration testing, combining with numerical method, is a potential alternat ive approach for determining elastic constants of materials because of its nondestructive characteristic, single test, and producing average propertie s. In order to simplify the modeling processes and to reduce complicated de rivation in the numerical method, the method of combining finite element an alysis and optimum design is adopted to inversely determine the elastic con stants in this work. Since both the finite element analysis and optimum des ign can be executed in a commercial program, the present method is easier t o apply and very flexible. In this work, the present method is verified by comparing with other methods, and it is applied to determine the elastic co nstants of aluminum and carbon/epoxy materials. The results indicate that t he present method can obtain very accurate elastic constants for the both m aterials and for both the thin and thick plates. It is shown that the bound ary conditions with all edges free are preferred, and the different dimensi ons and different stacking sequences have negligible effects on the determi nation of elastic constants of the materials. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd . All rights reserved.