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An adjoint-based procedure to determine weaknesses, or, more generally the material properties of structures is developed and tested. Given a series of force and deformation/strain measurements, the material properties are obtained by minimizing the weighted differences between the measured and computed values. Several examples with truss, plain strain and volume elements show the viability, accuracy and efficiency of the proposed methodology using both displacement and strain measurements. An important finding was that in order to obtain reliable, convergent results the gradient of the cost function has to be smoothed.

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