2008 Volume 2 Issue 5 Pages 593-603
In several engineering fields including biological, sports, aeronautical and aerospace identification of pressure distribution applied to structures is a very important issue. Several experimental techniques have been suggested to measure the distributed load with piezo-electric sensors or films. Such direct measurement often meets with difficulty because the geometry or rigidity of the contact surface may be altered by attaching the sensors to it. To overcome this difficulty, this paper discusses the estimation of pressure distribution applied to structures by the inverse analysis technique. A transmission matrix is introduced which provides a linear relation between distributed load and internal strain. Tikhonov regularizaton and truncation of singular value decomposition (TSVD) are used to stabilize the solutions of the inverse analysis. A numerical demonstration for the estimation of foot pressure applied to a rectangular plate is conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the present numerical formulation to identify the pressure distribution.
