Issue 33

M. Mokhtari et alii, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 33 (2015) 143-150; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.33.18 143 Focussed on characterization of crack tip fields Some experimental observations of crack-tip mechanics with displacement data M. Mokhtari, P. Lopez-Crespo, B. Moreno Department of Civil and Materials Engineering, University of Malaga, C/Dr. Ortiz Ramos s/n, 29071 Malaga, Spain plopezcrespo@uma.es M. Zanganeh ORAU, Oak Ridge, TN, USA mohammad.zanganehgheshlaghi@nasa.gov A BSTRACT . In the past two decades, crack-tip mechanics has been increasingly studied with full-field techniques. Within these techniques, Digital Image Correlation (DIC) has been most widely used due to its many advantages, to extract important crack-tip information, including Stress Intensity Factor (SIF), Crack Opening Displacement, J-integral, T-stress, closure level, plastic zone size, etc. However, little information is given in the literature about the experimental setup that provides best estimations for the different parameters. The current work aims at understanding how the experimental conditions used in DIC influence the crack-tip information extracted experimentally. The influence of parameters such as magnification factor, size of the images, position of the images with respect the crack-tip and size of the subset used in the correlation is studied. The influence is studied in terms of SIF and T-stress by using Williams ’ model. The concept of determination of the K-dominance zone from experimental data has also explored. In this regard, cyclic loading on a fatigue crack in a compact tension (CT) specimen, made of aluminium 2024-T351 alloy, has been applied and the surface deformation ahead of the crack tip has been examined. The comparison between theoretical and experimental values of K I showed that the effect of subset size on the measured K I is negligible compared to the effect of size of the image. K EYWORDS . Digital image correlation; Stress intensity factor; T-stress; Crack tip displacement field. I NTRODUCTION ince 1980s in which a group of researchers at the University of South Carolina [1-3] developed the digital image correlation (DIC) method for obtaining the full-field in-plain deformation of an object directly, a growing number of researches has been done to modify the method and its parameters. In brief, DIC compromises of three sequences including 1) sample preparation, 2) taking images before and after loading from the surface of the specimen, and finally 3) calculating displacement and strain information by image processing [4]. DIC is a straight forward, low cost and simple method to measure experimentally surface deformation data with few advantages compared to other full-field S