Digital Image Correlation

Interns

Minh Bui - Computer Engineering

Kristin Cheung - Electrical Engineering

Tiffany Dorgalli - Chemistry/Biochemistry

Fernanda Ferragut - Physics

Zaravere Ford - Chemistry/Biochemistry

Mateo Hernandez - Chemistry/Biochemistry

Harry Jung - Electrical Engineering

Aarya Kulkarni - Chemical Engineering

Jessica Lieu - Statistics and Data Science

Maria Raju - Electrical Engineering

Chiamaka Utom - Psychological and Brain Sciences

Carina Yuen - Chemical Engineering

Project Description

Digital Image Correlation, or “DIC”, is a widely used and very versatile method for digitally measuring displacement and strain for mechanical tests. These mechanical tests can be done on metals, plastics, and anything in between. The samples can be large enough to hold in your hand or so small that they can be loaded in a nano-mechanical testing setup. What makes DIC so useful is the ability to measure how much a sample has distorted/stretched/moved/etc. without ever having to touch the sample. By setting up a high speed camera facing the experiment, researchers are able to track how much a sample is strained- even from within an electron microscope! There are a number of different programs available to perform DIC for a mechanical test, but for samples that are micrometers to nanometers large, a common DIC software used is a program written for Matlab that a handful of Materials Science professors wrote. The goal of this project will be to learn the theory behind Digital Image Correlation and use this Matlab DIC program to measure the strain of a 5 micrometer size metal sample. We will learn how to select and track features of interest, measure distances and strains that a sample experiences, and scale the images used so that we can convert our measurements into real-world values.