Mechanical systems often contain components that exhibit nonlinear material behavior. Examples include large elastic deformations in seals and gaskets, strain-rate dependence and hysteresis during cyclic loading in rubbers and soft biological tissues, and elastoplastic flow and creep in metals. Together with its Nonlinear Structural Materials Module add-on, the COMSOL Multiphysics® software contains more than one hundred built-in material models that can be used for modeling highly complex material behavior. However, a drawback with these — often phenomenological — models is that they can contain a large number of material parameters, which need to be calibrated for each specific material in order to obtain accurate modeling predictions. In today’s blog post, we will demonstrate how these parameters can be estimated from experimental data obtained from common material tests using nonlinear least-squares minimization techniques. Read more
