Patent ID: 7107159

Claim:
A system for determining one or more elastic properties of a material, the system comprising: a first input means for receiving a first input signal representative of a driving force exerted on the material by an actuator at a driving-point; a second input means for receiving a second input signal representative of a driving-point velocity corresponding to the driving force; a third input means for receiving a third input signal representative of a driving-point displacement corresponding to the driving force; a signal generator means for generating a basis function signal for each one of a set of basis functions, the set of basis functions corresponding to the terms of a differential equation model of the motion of the driving-point, and each basis function comprising a function of any one or more of the input signals; and a processor means for analyzing the set of basis function signals in relation to the first input signal to determine coefficients of a linear combination of the basis function signals which best fits the first input signal, one or more of the coefficients then being representative of a value of one or more elastic properties of the material.