Trying to find the area of a complex-shaped hysteresis loop

MATLAB Community,

I am a novice in MATLAB and happen to thing that what I am trying to do is probably quite simple for someone that understands MATLAB better than I do.

I simply want to find the area of some material hysteresis loops. The hysteresis loop data can be found at

http://www.4shared.com/document/yo5DlKB7/hystereis_loop.html

where the first column is the displacent and the second column is force.

I have considered splitting the quadrants of the coordinate system of the hysteresis loops into 4 positive/positive quadrants so the areas could easily be summed together once the area of each quadrant was calculated. Each quadrant area would be calculated using the trapz function in MATLAB. I am sill having difficulty getting this to work though. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

[Andrew Newell]

Your data are not very smooth, so I would just use this:

Area = polyarea(displacement,force)