Identification of constitutive parameters for fractional viscoelasticity

• Proposing a model for parameters identification of fractional viscoelastic materials.
• Identification results are not sensitive to noisy measurement responses.
• Different space measurement points take no significant impact on results.
• The ant number of ant colony optimization algorithm is as big as possible.

This paper develops a numerical model to identify constitutive parameters in the fractional viscoelastic field. An explicit semi-analytical numerical model and a finite difference (FD) method based numerical model are derived for solving the direct homogenous and regionally inhomogeneous fractional viscoelastic problems, respectively. A continuous ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is employed to solve the inverse problem of identification. The feasibility of the proposed approach is illustrated via the numerical verification of a two-dimensional identification problem formulated by the fractional Kelvin–Voigt model, and the noisy data and regional inhomogeneity etc. are taken into account.