Surrogate-Assisted Genetic Optimization for Inverse Identification of Hyperelastic Material Parameters from Membrane Inflation Data

Soft deformable materials such as elastomers, biological tissues, and polymeric membranes are widely used in modern engineering applications including biomechanics, soft robotics, and flexible electronics. Accurate identification of their constitutive parameters is therefore essential for reliable mechanical modeling and design. Membrane inflation or bulge tests are commonly used for this purpose, where material parameters are typically identified from pressure–deflection measurements. However, such measurements generally require optical systems to capture membrane deformation, which increases experimental complexity. In this work, we propose a surrogate-assisted inverse identification framework for determining hyperelastic material parameters using pressure–volume data obtained from membrane inflation tests, thereby eliminating the need for optical deformation measurements. To reduce the computational cost associated with repeated forward simulations, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) surrogate model is trained using numerically generated pressure–volume data from finite-element simulations. The trained ANN efficiently predicts the pressure response of the membrane for different material parameters and volume influx values. A Genetic Algorithm (GA) is then employed to identify the optimal parameters by minimizing the discrepancy between measured and predicted responses. The proposed GA–ANN framework is demonstrated for the Mooney–Rivlin hyperelastic model and accurately recovers material parameters for both noise-free and noisy datasets, providing a computationally efficient and robust methodology for the characterization of soft membranes.