Measurement of the energy release rate of compressive failure in composites by combining infrared thermography and digital image correlation

The compressive behavior of composites after low velocity impact is one of the most important characteristics that should be taken into consideration when evaluating the damage tolerance of composite structures. In this paper, a novel experimental method combining infrared thermography and digital image correlation has been proposed to measure the energy release rate of composites under the compression-after-impact test. This method was chosen to avoid the error caused by the thermal stability assumption in the traditional methods that are used. First, a theoretical framework was developed and the formula for the energy release rate was established. Then, the calculation procedure has been described in detail with the combination of the temperature information from infrared thermography and the displacement information from the digital image correlation. Finally, an experimental case has been presented and by comparing the new method with the traditional methods, the accuracy of this proposed method has been validated.