Thermomechanical Behavior of Steels in Tension Studied with Synchronized Full-Field Deformation and Temperature Measurements

Abstract

Despite tensile testing being commonly used for investigating the mechanical behavior of materials, the occurrence of heterogeneous strain and increasing temperature at high strain rates make the experiment much more complex. This work presents a method integrating synchronous full-field stereo Digital Image Correlation (DIC) and Infrared Thermography (IRT). This method enabled high resolution investigations of the development of local temperatures and strains of the specimen during tensile loading of four steels at strain rates ranging from 2.5·10−4 to 900 s−1. The tests were monitored by a stereo setup of optical cameras and an infrared camera. Data acquisition was synchronized, and a pinhole camera model was used to translate the images from all cameras to the same three-dimensional space. The displacement vector fields from DIC were subtracted from the IRT images to represent the temperature maps in a Lagrangian coordinate system. The overall thermomechanical response of the materials was shown as 3D waterfall plots, which represent localized strain and temperature as a function of position and engineering strain. The results show that temperature increased homogeneously during uniform deformation at higher strain rates (10−2-900 s−1) and increased markedly with the onset of necking on the region of localized strain. At these strain rates, the localized increase of strain and temperature during necking were observed at the same global engineering strain and position, evidencing the spatial and temporal synchronization. The described method was used to accurately investigate the evolution of localized strain and temperature in both low and high strain rate regime.