Water-soluble stabilizer for speckle pattern fabrication

This work aims to provide a quick solution for impressing a well-defined and repeatable speckle pattern on the surface of a material sample. The proposed technique is based on a water-soluble stabilizer on which the speckle pattern generated and optimized via computer is printed. To verify the application, a two-dimensional (2D) digital image correlation (DIC) system is employed to measure the full-range strain distribution at the macroscopic level during a tensile test on open-hole aluminum specimen. The experimental setup consists mainly of an action camera, a macro lens, and an open-source 2D DIC software. The measured data obtained from the DIC are compared to the other ones provided both from a traditional measurement method based on strain gauge and by a numerical simulation. The results indicate that the approach is both accurate and reliable to obtain stress-strain curves especially in the presence of plastic deformations.