RELFIT: A program for determining prony series fits to measured relaxation data

Viscoelastic materials are often characterized in terms of stress relaxation moduli which decay in time. Finite element programs which model viscoelastic materials frequently require that these relaxation functions be defined as an exponential series (i.e., Prony Series) to exploit the numerical advantages of developing recursive equations for evaluating hereditary integrals. Obtaining these data fits can be extremely difficult when the data is spread over many decades in the logarithm of time. RELFIT is a nonlinear optimization program that iteratively determines the Prony series coefficients and relaxation times so as to minimize the least squares error in the data fit. An overview of the code, a description of the required inputs (i.e., users`s instructions), and a demonstration problem are presented