The Application of DIC Technique to Evaluate Residual Tensile Strength of Aluminum Alloy Plates with Multi-Site Damage of Collinear and Non-Collinear Cracks

Abstract

This paper introduces an aviation industrial application of digital image correlation (DIC) technique on the measurement of residual tensile strength (RTS). In order to investigate multi-site damage (MSD) that is common in the fuselage of aging aircraft, RTS of 2024-T4 aluminum alloy sheet with MSD was evaluated using DIC technique. Firstly, the four-factor and three-level orthogonal experiment was designed to optimize the DIC method to control the strain calculation error by considering subset size, interpolation tap, calibration score and step size. Secondly, RTS and strain fields were generated to analyze the path of crack propagation. The results show the optimal factor combination is 0.018 of calibration score, 23 pixels of subset size, step size is 1/4 of subset size and the filter size of interpolation calibration is 8 pixels. With the increase of spacing between adjacent holes, the RTS increases and the collinear cracked specimen becomes more perilous than that of non-collinear cracked while the hole spacing is 25 mm from the statistical analysis. Based on the Net section yield criterion, the RTS was calculated, which can give a conservative prediction of RTS.

Keywords

• digital image correlation
• multi-site damage
• residual tensile strength
• strain calculation precision