Estimation of elastic parameters in a nonlinear elliptic model of a plate (Q1174837)

The author considers the estimation of an elastic parameter in a nonlinear von Kármán model for large deformations of a thin plate with uniform cross section and with variable Young modulus. A model error function is introduced and conditions under which a solution and its differentiability may be analyzed locally are given. These are used to obtain conditions implying convergence of the augmented Lagrangian method. When the conditions are not satisfied, an analysis of the penalty method applied to the problem is provided. Numerical experiments are reported.