Digital Image Correlation Development for the Study of Materials Including Multiple Crossing Cracks

This study reports on the digital image correlation (DIC) procedure and its limitation in the case of fracture analysis. A comparison of three different algorithms was carried out for the case of crossing cracks. An improvement of the DIC procedure was proposed to solve the uncertainty problems at the vicinity of the junction of two cracks. This procedure was proposed to perform an evaluation of the displacement when multiple cracks are present in the subset. It was developed using classical minimization process, including Heaviside functions in the kinematical field representation. Some tests were performed to demonstrate the performances of this new algorithm. An application of the multiple fractures on Argillite rock is shown to validate the efficiency and the robustness of the proposed method.