ASA 127th Meeting M.I.T. 1994 June 6-10

3pSAb2. A new algorithm for determining the elastic constants of transversely isotropic solids.

Rok Sribar

Wolfgang Sachse

Dept. of Theor. and Appl. Mech., Cornell Univ., Thurston Hall, Ithaca, NY 14850-1503

This paper reports a new algorithm for determining the elastic constants of transversely isotropic solids. The elastic constants are calculated from experimental group velocity data measured in general directions belonging to the zonal plane. The algorithm incorporates a theoretical calculation of the group velocities, and a feed-forward neural network (FFNN). In the procedure, the experimental, and the theoretical group velocity data are fitted to polynomials in a linear least-square sense to obtain appropriate training sets for the FFNN. When convergence of the network is achieved, it is used to estimate the elastic constants. With this procedure, we can determine C11, C12, and C13 elastic constants of zinc with precision better than 5%, even when the initial estimates of this Cij's are off by as much as their value. [Work partially supported by ONR.]