On a boundary condition used in Virtual Fields methods

The Virtual Fields Method (VFM) and the Eigenfunction Virtual Fields Method (EVFM) are inverse techniques for estimating constitutive properties from full-field experimental data. In these, a set of virtual fields is used in the Principle of Virtual Work (PVW) to yield a system of algebraic equations for the unknown material parameters. In a typical experiment, one does not know the distribution of tractions over the external surface of the specimen, but the total force is generally measured. In order to still enable evaluation of the external virtual work integral that appears in PVW, in all the work to date on Virtual Fields methods, the virtual displacements are restricted to be uniform over the portion of the exterior surface where tractions are prescribed so that the external virtual work is simply the inner product of the known total force vector and the uniform value of the chosen virtual displacement vector. In this work, we show that this constraint can be relaxed to obtain a more flexible version of EVFM. The proposed modification is used to obtain orthotropic elastic constants from a simulated unnotched Iosipescu test, and is shown to yield tighter estimates than previously obtained wherein the boundary virtual displacements were constrained to be uniform. This approach, which is novel to Virtual Fields methods, allows us to include domains in the interior of the specimen and therefore, results in an EVFM formulation capable of dealing with material heterogeneity, missing data and discontinuities in specimen geometry.