Fracture mechanics of additive manufactured crack-like notches by digital image correlation

The rapid development of a variety of Additive Manufacturing (AM) techniques is witnessed by the large interest of the scientific community. Among the numerous new features offered by these techniques, very lately the possibility of including cracks of any shape, direction, and position inside AM samples to validate FEM models was explored. Therefore, the necessity arose of full-field measurement techniques that would allow the evaluation of the fracture mechanics parameters in the cases of both linear elastic and partially plastic materials, as a function of the fracture modes. Invented in the ’80 of the XX century, the Digital Image Correlation (DIC) in recent years has taken place in nearly every laboratory. It is used to measure displacements, and by numerical differentiation or coupling with Finite Element Method, to calculate strains at different spatial scales. In particular, two procedures that were successfully employed on a specific kind of specimens, based on DIC at a small scale near the crack-tip, in this paper are shown in detail.The authors wish to acknowledge the support of European Commission through the project “Advanced design rules for optimal dynamic properties of additive manufacturing products – A_MADAM”, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 734455.Publishe