Investigation of Advanced Material Through Digital Volume Correlation Measurement Techniques

Composite materials are seeing increased industrial usage in high-performance applications were lightweight, high-strength, and material tailorability is required. Due to their heterogenous structure, displacement and strain fields developed under loading conditions are often complex and difficult to predict. Digital volume correlation (DVC) offers a novel method for the deformation analysis of composite structures. Through the utilization of micro-computed tomography datasets can be obtained and utilized to visualize three-dimensional dataset for DVC. This thesis explores the utilization of DVC for the analysis of composite materials. A methodology is developed based on artificially seeding materials with micro-particles to acquire the sufficient image contrast. A rigid body displacement test is then utilized to evaluate the errors associated with each particle, narrow DVC parameters, and select between particles. Utilizing this methodology displacement and strain fields were obtained for copper seeded epoxy, and 3D printed copper impregnated PLA sample under compressive, and tensile loading respectively.