Characterization of elastic parameters for functionally graded material by a meshfree method combined with the NMS approach

This study aims to characterize the elastic parameters in a functionally graded material. To implement this work, a parameter identification algorithm is proposed by combining a meshless method with the Nelder–Mead simplex (NMS) approach. The meshless method is based on the method of fundamental solutions and a radial basis function approximation, while the NMS approach is adopted to minimize the objective function and at the same time to obtain the unknown parameters. The objective function in this study characterizes the difference between the observed and the numerically predicted displacements under the estimated parameters. The robustness and effectiveness of the proposed scheme are verified by three numerical examples.