Inverse approach to identification of material parameters of cyclic elasto-plasticity for component layers of a bimetallic sheet

The present paper proposes a novel approach to the identification of the mechanical properties of individual component layers of a bimetallic sheet. In this approach, a set of material parameters in a constitutive model of cyclic elasto-plasticity are identified for the two layers of the sheet simultaneously by minimizing the difference between the experimental results and the corresponding results of numerical simulation. This method has an advantage of using the experimental data (tensile load vs strain curve in the uniaxial tension test and the bending moment vs curvature diagram in the cyclic bending test) for a whole bimetallic sheet but not for individual component layers. An optimization technique based on the iterative multipoint approximation concept is used for the identification of the material parameters. This paper describes the experimentation, the fundamentals and the technique of the identification, and the verification of this approach using two types of constitutive models (the Chaboche-Rousselier and the Prager models) for an aluminum clad stainless steel sheet. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.