Damage Detection in a Polymer Matrix Composite from 4D Displacement Field Measurements

Standard Digital Volume Correlation (DVC) approaches enable quantitative analyses of specimen deformation to be performed by measuring displacement fields between discrete states. Such frameworks are thus limited by the number of scans (due to acquisition duration). Considering only one projection per loading step, Projection-based Digital Volume Correlation (P-DVC) allows 4D (i.e., space and time) full-field measurements to be carried out over entire loading histories. The sought displacement field is decomposed over a basis of separated variables, namely, temporal and spatial modes. In the present work, the spatial modes are constructed via scan-wise DVC, and only the temporal amplitudes are sought via P-DVC. The proposed method is applied to a glass fiber mat reinforced polymer specimen containing a machined notch, subjected to in situ cyclic tension and imaged via X-ray Computed Tomography. The P-DVC enhanced DVC method employed herein enables for the quantification of damage growth over the entire loading history up to failure.