Digital Image Correlation Measurements of Mode I Fatigue Delamination in Laminated Composites

A Digital Image Correlation (DIC) based method is proposed to characterize Mode I fatigue delamination onset and propagation in laminated composites. With the help of DIC, the displacement field around a delamination crack is obtained and further processed to determine the position of the crack tip. With this method the delamination length can be measured automatically in each cycle with a precision on the order of few hundreds of micrometers. The fatigue delamination onset life is then determined by detecting the increase of the delamination length, and the fatigue delamination propagation rate is calculated. The proposed method produces more conservative fatigue life measurements in comparison with the compliance increase method in ASTM D6115.