Inference of Heterogeneous Material Properties via Infinite-Dimensional Integrated DIC

TL;DR

This paper introduces an advanced PDE-constrained inverse framework, -IDIC, for nondestructively inferring complex, spatially-varying material properties from deformation images, capable of capturing fine details and sharp features.

Contribution

The paper develops -IDIC, a novel infinite-dimensional formulation for material property inference that handles high-dimensional, heterogeneous parameters with regularization and efficient algorithms.

Findings

Successfully characterizes complex material heterogeneities.

Achieves mesh-independent convergence and robustness to noise.

Capable of recovering fine-scale and sharp material features.

Abstract

We present a scalable and efficient framework for the inference of spatially-varying parameters of continuum materials from image observations of their deformations. Our goal is the nondestructive identification of arbitrary damage, defects, anomalies and inclusions without knowledge of their morphology or strength. Since these effects cannot be directly observed, we pose their identification as an inverse problem. Our approach builds on integrated digital image correlation (IDIC, Besnard Hild, Roux, 2006), which poses the image registration and material inference as a monolithic inverse problem, thereby enforcing physical consistency of the image registration using the governing PDE. Existing work on IDIC has focused on low-dimensional parameterizations of materials. In order to accommodate the inference of heterogeneous material propertes that are formally infinite dimensional, we present $\infty$-IDIC, a general formulation of the PDE-constrained coupled image registration and inversion posed directly in the function space setting. This leads to several mathematical and algorithmic challenges arising from the ill-posedness and high dimensionality of the inverse problem. To address ill-posedness, we consider various regularization schemes, namely $H^1$ and total variation for the inference of smooth and sharp features, respectively. To address the computational costs associated with the discretized problem, we use an efficient inexact-Newton CG framework for solving the regularized inverse problem. In numerical experiments, we demonstrate the ability of $\infty$-IDIC to characterize complex, spatially varying Lam\'e parameter fields of linear elastic and hyperelastic materials. Our method exhibits (i) the ability to recover fine-scale and sharp material features, (ii) mesh-independent convergence performance and hyperparameter selection, (iii) robustness to observational noise.