Walkthrough and History of the Virtual Fields Method
This paper presents the history of the Virtual Fields Method, an identification method developed 30 years ago in order to identify constitutive parameters from full field measurements. This method was initially proposed in the case of bending plate problems, but it has progressively been adapted to many other testing configurations. In this paper we look back at the first developments of the method and highlight the main problems that were progressively tackled, especially in terms of increasing complexity of the constitutive equations that were considered, and improvement of the identification technique itself to make it more efficient.