High-precision deformation and damage development assessment of composite materials by high-speed camera, high-frequency impulse and digital image correlation techniques

Abstract Although composite materials like wood, vulcanized fiber and carbon reinforced plastic (CFRP) are already investigated by means of their mechanical properties, the abrupt fracture mechanism as well as the deformation behavior right before and after fracture has not been investigated. However, it is marginally investigated for CFRP because of the quite high fracture speed. The knowledge about the damage evolution as the crack start and propagation can help to improve the strength and sensitivity to fracture by improving the materials structure and to utilize these materials for structural applications. For the investigated materials, fracture happens abruptly as it is the nature of composites and the detailed fracture mechanisms could not be detected by conventional measurement techniques. Therefore, an innovative combination of testing devices is presented which is able to fill this gap. Tensile tests were performed to receive conventional stress-strain curves. At the fracture stage, a high-speed camera recorded the fracture process. This information could be combined with digital image correlation (DIC) to visualize the deformation behavior. At the same time acoustic emission (AE) was used to detect the spectrum of mechanical vibrations which gives information about the released energy due to fracture. The challenging triggering of the high-speed camera was solved for each material individually. By using improved light sources, the recording speed could be set up to 2 million frames per second (Mfps). The investigations show different fracture mechanisms for each composite. Wood and vulcanized fiber were also investigated in different directions due to their anisotropy.