Material parameter identification of sandwich beams by an inverse method

Sandwich structures are extensively used in engineering because of their high specific stiffness and strength. The modelling of sandwich structures has been studied extensively, but less attention has been paid to their material identification. This paper proposes an inverse method for the material identification of sandwich beams by measured flexural resonance frequencies. The procedure is illustrated with numerically generated test data and also applied on experimentally measured data taken out of literature. An error estimation procedure is conducted to discover and discuss the main error sources. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.