Inverse determination of the elastoplastic and damage parameters on small punch tests

The small punch test (SPT) is very useful in those situations where it is necessary to use small volumes of material. The aim of this paper is to create and validate a methodology for the determination of the mechanical and damage properties of steels from the load-displacement curve obtained by means of SPTs. This methodology is based on the inverse method, the design of experiments, the polynomial curve adjustment and the evolutionary multi-objective optimization, and also allows simulating the SPTs. In order to validate the proposed methodology, the numerical results have been compared with experimental results obtained by means of normalized tests. Two dimensional axisymmetric and three-dimensional simulations have been performed in order to allow the analysis of isotropic and anisotropic materials, respectively.