Full knowledge of material elastic properties is required to facilitate design in many applications. The existence of misorientation between the geometric axes of the part and the material symmetry axes has in particularly created challenged in design of composite structure. In this thesis the potential for optimal identification of material symmetries for a general anisotropic material through a water immersion technique is explored. The concept is extensible to any class of symmetry groups and does not assume a-priori knowledge of the material. Initial experimental results for determining the elastic constants as well as locating the symmetry planes are presented. Many materials have not been investigated completely by a method such as the one described. The specific contribution of this work is to demonstrate this process for experimental data sets. The primary focus is on carbon-carbon composite material. The method is demonstrated using a single crystal with known properties
