Isogeometric analysis for strain field measurements

In this paper, the potential of isogeometric analysis for strain field measurement by digital image correlation is investigated. Digital image correlation (DIC) is a full field kinematics measurement technique based on gray level conservation principle and the formulation we adopt allows for using arbitrary displacement bases. The high continuity properties of Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) functions are exploited herein as an additional regularization of the initial ill-posed problem. k-Refinement is analyzed on an artificial test case where the proposed methodology is shown to outperform the usual finite element-based DIC. Finally a fatigue tensile test on a thin aluminum sheet is analyzed. Strain localization occurs after a certain number of cycles and combination of NURBS into a DIC algorithm clearly shows a great potential to improve the robustness of non-linear constitutive law identification.