Robust Recovery of Optimally Smoothed Polymer Relaxation Spectrum from Stress Relaxation Test Measurements

The relaxation spectrum is a fundamental viscoelastic characteristic from which other material functions used to describe the rheological properties of polymers can be determined. The spectrum is recovered from relaxation stress or oscillatory shear data. Since the problem of the relaxation spectrum identification is ill-posed, in the known methods, different mechanisms are built-in to obtain a smooth enough and noise-robust relaxation spectrum model. The regularization of the original problem and/or limit of the set of admissible solutions are the most commonly used remedies. Here, the problem of determining an optimally smoothed continuous relaxation time spectrum is directly stated and solved for the first time, assuming that discrete-time noise-corrupted measurements of a relaxation modulus obtained in the stress relaxation experiment are available for identification. The relaxation time spectrum model that reproduces the relaxation modulus measurements and is the best smoothed in the class of continuous square-integrable functions is sought. Based on the Hilbert projection theorem, the best-smoothed relaxation spectrum model is found to be described by a finite sum of specific exponential-hyperbolic basis functions. For noise-corrupted measurements, a quadratic with respect to the Lagrange multipliers term is introduced into the Lagrangian functional of the model's best smoothing problem. As a result, a small model error of the relaxation modulus model is obtained, which increases the model's robustness. The necessary and sufficient optimality conditions are derived whose unique solution yields a direct analytical formula of the best-smoothed relaxation spectrum model. The related model of the relaxation modulus is given. A computational identification algorithm using the singular value decomposition is presented, which can be easily implemented in any computing environment. The approximation error, model smoothness, noise robustness, and identifiability of the polymer real spectrum are studied analytically. It is demonstrated by numerical studies that the algorithm proposed can be successfully applied for the identification of one- and two-mode Gaussian-like relaxation spectra. The applicability of this approach to determining the Baumgaertel, Schausberger, and Winter spectrum is also examined, and it is shown that it is well approximated for higher frequencies and, in particular, in the neighborhood of the local maximum. However, the comparison of the asymptotic properties of the best-smoothed spectrum model and the BSW model a priori excludes a good approximation of the spectrum in the close neighborhood of zero-relaxation time.