Proceedings of the XIth International Congress and Exposition

June 2-5, 2008 Orlando, Florida USA

2008 Society for Experimental Mechanics Inc.

T-stress Determination Using Digital Image Correlation

M. Zanganeh1, R.A. Tomlinson2 and J.R. Yates3

University of Sheffield, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Mappin Street,
Sheffield, S1 3JD UK
1
m.zanganeh@sheffield.ac.uk, 2r.a.tomlinson@sheffield.ac.uk, 3j.yates@sheffield.ac.uk,

ABSTRACT
The digital image correlation (DIC) technique has been assessed to determine the T-stress and stress intensity
factors (SIF) for fatigue cracks in a DCB specimen made from 7010-T7651 aluminium alloy and subjected to
different loading ranges. A MATLAB-based code has been developed to determine interactively the T-stress and
the SIF from the raw displacement data gained from the digital image correlation technique and fitted to the
Williamss displacement field model. FE simulation was also undertaken and good agreement between
experimental and numerical results was found. It was concluded that the technique is applicable for fatigue crack
studies and T-stress determinations.
INTRODUCTION
Traditionally in fracture mechanics it is assumed that the state of the strain and stress field ahead of the crack tip
can be characterized by a single parameter, called the stress intensity factor in linear elastic fracture mechanics,,
or the J integral in elastic plastic fracture mechanics. These parameters depend on the geometry of the specimen,
and mode and magnitude of the applied load on the specimen. However, it has been observed that there many
circumstances in which this single parameter is not able to characterize the strain field ahead of the crack tip. For
example, Larsson and Carlson [1], tried to apply the same level of stress intensity factor (SIF) to specimens with
different geometries. However, surprisingly they observed that despite the same level of applied SIF, different
plastic zones and different crack opening displacements were obtained which obviously means that the SIF alone
is not adequate to describe the crack tip strain state at least under the load conditions they applied.
In order to describe more accurately the crack tip stress state, it has been proposed that a second parameter in
elastic fracture mechanics should be used in addition to the stress intensity factor. One such parameter is the Tstress which is defined as the second non-singular term in Williamss [2] crack tip stress field solution. The Tstress is a constant stress parallel to the crack and is a measure of the constraint around the tip of a crack in
contained yielding problems [3]. Specimens having a positive T-stress have a higher constraint than those with a
negative T-stress. The T stress is proportional to the remote applied stress [4] and the constant of proportionality
changes for different loading and boundary conditions.
After extensive investigation [e.g. 1,3,4,5] it has become evident that the T-stress has a vital role in interpreting
many phenomena observed in fracture mechanics, such as directional stability problem of fatigue crack paths [6];
the initiation angle of fracture and consequently the apparent fracture toughness [5]; crack growth rate; crack tip
constraints; crack closure; and the shape and size of the plastic zone ahead of the crack tip [7, 8]. To determine
the T-stress numerically many different methods have been proposed in different types of specimens. These
include the stress substitution, variational formulation, Eshelby J integral, interaction integral, line spring and
weight function methods [9]. However, the accuracy of these numerical techniques depend on geometry or mesh
refinement and are only applicable to specific configurations. Therefore, the need is evident to have a robust
experimental technique to determine the T-stress in order to validate simulations.
In recent years Digital Image Correlation (DIC) has been shown to be a promising technique for the determination
of mode I, II and mixed stress intensity factors [10, 11, 12]. Therefore the aim of this work was to develop these
methodologies to determine the T-stress in addition to the stress intensity factor.

METHODOLOGY
The Williams solution [Error! Bookmark not defined.] can be extended to the mixed mode conditions to specify
the displacement field ahead of a crack as follows:
n

(n 4)
r 2
n
n n
n
u =
cos
a n + + ( 1) cos

2
2 2
2

n =1 2

Mode I
n

2
r
v I = a n n ( 1)n sin n + n sin (n 4)

2
2 2
2
n =1 2

(1a)

and,
n

(n 4)
r
n
n n
n
u =
sin
bn + ( 1) sin

II
2
2
2 2

n =1 2

Mode II
n

2
r
v II = bn n + ( 1)n cos n + n cos (n 4 )

2
2
2 2
n =1 2

(1b)

where, u and v are horizontal (x direction) and vertical (y direction) displacements in mode I and II. is the shear
modulus and

3
for plane stress and = 3 4 for plane strain conditions, where is the Poissons
1 +

ratio. a and b are constants and r and are defined as in Figure 1.

yy

xy
xx

Crack

x
Figure 1- Stress state ahead of a crack tip

So, the mixed mode displacement fields (u and v) which are obtained from DIC, can be derived by superimposing
the mode I and II displacement field. By defining f n ,m (r , ) , g n ,m (r , ) , hn ,m (r , ) and l n ,m (r , ) as follows, the
displacement field can be written in a matrix form.

f n ,m

(n 4) m
r 2
n
n
n
n
= m a n + + ( 1) cos m cos

2
2
2
2
2

g n ,m =
hn ,m =
l n ,m =

n
2
m

(n 4)
n
n n
n
an + ( 1) sin
sin

2
2
2 2
2

(2)

n
2
m

(n 4)
n
n n
n
a n ( 1) sin
+ sin

2
2
2 2
2

n
2
m

(n 4)
n
n n
n
an + ( 1) cos
+ cos

2
2
2 2
2

u1 f1,1 L f n ,1
M
M

u m f1,m L f n ,m
=
v1 h1,1 L hn ,1
M
M

v m h1,1 L hn ,1

g1,1 L g n ,1 a1

M
M
g1,m L g n ,m a 2

l1,1 Ll n ,1 b1
M
M

l1,1 Ll n ,1 bn

(3)

where m is the data point index. It should be noted that the previous equations have been derived for a stationary
case and does not contain any rigid body motion term. However, experimental results always have some rigid
body motion in them. This can be compensated by adding a constant term in equation 3 to give:

u1 1
M M

u m 1
=
v1 0
M M

v m 0

f1,1 L f n ,1
M
f1,m L f n ,m
h1,1 L hn ,1
h1,1 L hn ,1

0
0
1
M
1

a0
g1,1 L g n ,1 a1


M
M
g1,m L g n ,m a n

l1,1 Ll n ,1 b0
b1
M

l1,1 Ll n ,1 M
b
n

(4)

where ao and bo are used to compensate the rigid body motion. Equation 4 is an over-determined system of
equations and can be solved to find a and b.
3

By expanding the equations 1, keeping the terms up to order r 2 and comparing with the more common notation,
i.e. using stress intensity factors and T-stress, it can be shown that

KI =

a1
2

, K II =

b1
2

and T = 4a 2

in which KI is mode I stress intensity factor, KII is mode II stress intensity factor and T is the T-stress.

(5)

EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS

Experiments were undertaken on both notches, and fatigue cracks emanating from notches. In the first stage,
pure mode I loading conditions were created ahead of a 4mm notch in a 5mm thick DCB specimen with the
dimensions shown in Figure 2. The specimen was machined from a plate 7010 T7651 aluminium alloy and spark
eroded to introduce the notch into the specimen. The required speckles for DIC were produced on the surface of
specimen using a fine spray of black paint. A 100kN MAND hydraulic test machine was used to load the
specimen. Two load ranges of 0.5kN to 1.5kN and 0.5kN to 3kN were applied to the specimen. A 14 bit,
1600x1200 CCD camera and a Nikon lens with the resolution of 18.75 microns was used to record the images.
DaVis software [13] was employed to correlate the images. The software was set up to use a 64x64 pixels
interrogation window, followed by two iterations using a 32x32 pixels interrogation window with 50% overlap.
Figure 3 shows a typical correlated displacement field obtained around a crack.

Figure 2 - DCB specimen dimensions in mm

Vertical displacement

Horizontal displacement

Figure 3 Typical correlated displacement field obtained around a crack using DIC
The displacement field obtained from DIC was imported to a MATLAB based code developed to determine the
stress intensity factors and the T-stress using equations 4 and 5 under plane stress conditions. In the solution
process of equation 4, the number of terms was increased until the stress intensity factors and the T-stress
converged to within one decimal place of the previous two points. The convergence curves of the results are
shown in Figure 4.

(a)

(b)

Figure 4 Convergence curves for T-stress and intensity factors

In parallel to the experiments, the finite element method, ABAQUS/CAE [14], was used to find the stress intensity
factors and T-stress. In order to check the accuracy of the numerical analysis, a uniaxial tensile model was
generated for a centre-crack in a large plate with a/w=0.08 and w/h=1, in which a is the crack length, w is width of
specimen and h is height of specimen. The T-stress was determined for a range of loads and compared to an
analysis published by Fett [15]. The results showed only 0.6% difference when compared to the published data. A
double-edge-cracked rectangular plate (a/w=0.4 and h/w>1.5) was also modelled using FE. In this case T-stress
results were about 2% different from reference [17].
A comparison was made between the FE results, the DIC results using equation 3 (without considering the rigid
body motion term) and using equation 4 (with rigid body motion term) and is shown in Table 1. It can be seen that
in both SIF and T-stress calculations using the displacement field, rigid body motion compensation is of a crucial
importance. By using equation 4, which accounts for the rigid body motion, this has improved the results from the

meaningless results of equation 3 solution to a reasonable range of results which are consistent with the
numerical simulations.
Table 1 Comparison between FE, DIC (without rigid body motion terms)
and DIC (with rigid body motion terms)
ABAQUS

Load [kN]
0.5 to 1.5
0.5 to 3

DIC (without rigid body terms, eq. 3)

DIC (with rigid body terms, eq. 4)

KI

KII

KI

KII

KI

KII

4.952
12.380

-0.011
-0.028

7.888
19.72

12.148
31.700

1.257
3.800

572.61
1795.5

4.990
9.701

-0.212
-0.750

6.998
19.973

The experiments were continued by growing a fatigue crack from the notch tip, using a 0.5kN to 2kN load range
with 15Hz loading frequency. The crack growth was paused when the fatigue crack length was 1mm, 4mm, 8mm
and 15mm. For each increment of crack growth load ranges of 0.5kN to 1.5kN and 0.5kN to 3kN were applied,
images were recorded at each load and processed to determine the stress intensity factors and T-stress. Results
are compared with ABAQUS simulations in Figure 5.
30

0.5 to 1.5kN load range

KI ABAQUS
25

KI DIC
KII ABAQUS

20

KII DIC
T ABAQUS

15

T DIC

10
5
0
0

10

12

14

16

18

20

14

16

18

20

-5
Fatigue crack length [mm]
80

0.5 to 3kN load range

KI ABAQUS

70

KI DIC
KII ABAQUS

60

KII DIC

50

T ABAQUS
T DIC

40
30
20
10
0
-10

10

12

Fatigue crack length [mm]

Figure 5 T-stress and intensity factors determined for different load ranges

DISCUSSION
From Figure 5, the results obtained from the DIC experiments are in good agreement with the finite element
results. As expected, for a DCB specimen the determined mode II SIF are almost zero. In all the cases it is
observed that the experimental stress intensity factors are equal to or slightly lower than the finite element results.
This is probably due to the fact that crack closure and contact between faces of the cracks has not been
considered in numerical simulations but these effects are automatically evident in the experimental results. In
other words the stress intensity factors determined from DIC results are effective stress intensity factors. The Tstresses are also in acceptable agreement with the finite element results. The agreement between FE and DIC
appears to improve as the fatigue crack grows longer. This might be due to the fact that the displacement field
ahead of a notch is slightly different from a fatigue crack displacement field. However, as the crack grows the
effect of notch displacement field in the field of view is decreased and consequently the experimental data are
less affected by the notch and therefore the calculated T-stresses are more consistent with the numerical
simulations.
CONCLUSIONS
T-stress and stress intensity factors were determined experimentally using digital image correlation and
numerically using a finite element method. It was shown that in determining the both stress intensity factors and
T-stress the rigid body motion must be compensated to obtain reasonable results. It was also shown that the Tstress and stress intensity factors gained experimentally for both notched and fatigue cracks are in good
agreement with finite elements results which demonstrates that the technique is of great applicability in fatigue
crack studies and T-stress determinations.
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