GA15

Abstract

Laboratory experiments are still mostly designed by trial and error method using the expert knowledge of the material model to be calibrated.

This is, however, a difficult task in the case of advanced models developed to simulate engineering problems by non-linear finite element

techniques. Existing methods for the model-based design of optimal experiments suffer from the high computational demands and lack of

robustness of the underlying optimisation process, which makes their application to non-linear finite element simulations difficult. The goal of

this project is thus to develop numerical tools to design robust and optimal experiments for calibration of complex nonlinear material models,

with emphasis given to coupled heat and moisture transfer. Novelties of our approach consist in the introduction of (i) global sensitivity indices

to ensure the robustness of the resulting design and (ii) computationally cheap surrogates based on the polynomial chaos expansion to

reduce computational demands of the design optimisation process.