approach, the macro-scale material uncertainty is directly identified based on the measurements of the macro-scale,
e.g. coupon level, observables [30,31]. The interested reader is referred to [18,32] for more comprehensive reviews on the
uncertainty representation of composite material properties.
In the present study, a probabilistic approach is developed to reconstruct stochastic macro-scale material properties
from direct macro-scale measurements. The study is presented in a sequence of two papers. The first paper [33] is
concerned with the construction of the experimental database. While in the second paper, the present manuscript,
the experimental information is assimilated to reconstruct a random field characterising the Young’s modulus.
The experimental measurements [33] consists of an ensemble of mobility frequency response functions measured at
several fixed points along a number of geometrically identical cantilever beams obtained using a linear laser Doppler
vibrometer. For each realisation of the experiment, a deterministic inverse analysis based on a forward finite element
model of the cantilever beam is performed in [33] to infer the corresponding equivalent Young’s modulus of the composite
material. In the present manuscript, based on a limited number of vibration tests, the work in [34,35] is extended to model
the heterogeneous Young’s modulus of a composite cantilever beam in the form of a one-dimensional spatial random field.
In addition to the characterisation of the aleatory uncertainty associated with sample-to-sample variability of the Young’s
modulus, the proposed approach also enables the quantification of the epistemic uncertainty due to the insufficiency of the
number of experiments. In order to enable a finite-dimensional representation of uncertainty, the Young’s modulus
random field is discretised using the Karhunen–Lo
eve expansion [36] based on the empirical sample covariance matrix.
The Karhunen–Lo
eve random variables are then expanded into the Hermite Polynomial Chaos (PC) basis [1]. Point
estimates of the PC expansion coefficients are obtained using Bayesian inference techniques. Additionally, to quantify the
uncertainty due to the small-size ensemble measurements, the coefficients of the PC expansion are themselves considered
as random variables whose statistics are obtained from the asymptotic distribution of the Bayesian estimates. Clearly,
most identification problems are limited to the insufficiency of available data, a problem usually addressed by quantifying
the associated epistemic uncertainty. The validity of the present uncertainty representation approach is investigated using
a standard cross-validation approach. It is worth noting that although the methodology used in this work has been applied
to identify the Young’s modulus field, it could be applied to any general identification problem, i.e., identification of other
properties as well as other materials or fabrics, provided that enough experimental information is available. The proposed
construction has several advantages : (i) it does not assume any particular form, e.g. Gaussian, log-normal, or Weibull, for
the marginal probability distribution of the Young’s modulus, (ii) it preserves the first and second order statistics of the
experimental samples and approximates their marginal distribution, (iii) it can be readily integrated into uncertainty
propagation solvers such as the Spectral Stochastic Finite Element (SSFEM) [1], perturbation-based techniques [2,11], and
the Monte Carlo simulation, and (iv) it is applicable to representation of other spatial stochastic material properties such as
the shear modulus.
In this manuscript, the proposed approach to reconstruct the Young’s modulus random field is introduced first in
Sections 2 and 3. The work in these sections extends the probabilistic identification approach of [34,35] to reconstruct the
random field E given the discrete ensemble of realisations ½
~
E. Synthesised realisations of the reconstructed random field
are used to quantify the aleatory and the epistemic uncertainties associated with the experimental database of the field in
Section 4. Finally, in Section 5, an attempt is made to validate the identified stochastic Young’s modulus field before
concluding the work in Section 6.
2. Spectral decomposition of the Young’s modulus field
Corresponding to each of M composite beam specimen, optimal realisations of Young’s modulus ½
~
E at certain spatial
locations have been identified in Part I [33], Fig. 1. Based on an ensemble of measured frequency response functions on
each composite specimen, the realisations of the Young’s modulus have been acquired by solving M deterministic inverse
problems. Each of these spatially variable Young’s modules fields can be considered as independent realisations of an
underlying continuous Young’s modulus random field.
2.1. Karhunen–Lo
eve expansion of the Young’s modulus
The Young’s modulus is assumed to be a second-order random field (RF) and is denoted by E; therefore, it admits a
Karhunen–Lo
eve (KL) expansion [36]. The expansion is based on the spectral decomposition of the covariance matrix [C
E
]
of the discrete (nodal) values of the Young’s modulus. In the absence of a complete statistical description of E, ½C
~
E
can be
P5
P10
P2
P6
P1
P3
P4
P7
P8
P9
P13
P12
P11
P0
Fig. 1. A composite beam specimen.
L. Mehrez et al. / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 27 (2012) 484–498486