Digital image correlation based high-speed crack tip locating method and its application

Based on a digital image correlation (DIC) method with the measurements of a high speed crack''s displacement and strain fields, a technique to accurately and automatically locate its crack tip has been developed. The crack tip is identified by finding the abrupt jump on the opening (or dislocation) curve of a point on the trace of the crack propagation, while the opening is measured through a virtual extensometer technique and the abrupt jump is identified by finding the peak on the curve. The method was verified using a specially designed experiment and applied to measure the critical crack tip opening angle of a rock sample. Because the involvement of analytical models has been avoided and then the good performance could be ensured for low resolution speckle images, this technique is expected to be very useful in the quantitative study of high speed cracks in experiments using high speed cameras.