On the Use of NURBS Functions for Displacement Derivatives Measurement by Digital Image Correlation

In this paper, we propose to investigate the potential improvement of using Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) functions for displacement measurements by digital image correlation (DIC). The aim is at improving the performance of DIC to capture with low uncertainty and low noise levels not only the displacement field but also its derivatives. Indeed, when the displacement field is used to feed constitutive law identification procedures, displacement derivatives are required and thus may be measured with robustness. Two examples illustrate the potential of NURBS for DIC: a compressive test on a wood sample and a bending test on a steel beam. For the latter, beam kinematics are adopted and NURBS are used in order to capture the variation of the curvature (second derivative of the displacement) along the beam axis. For these two examples, an error study based on a decomposition of the error into the correlation error and the interpolation error, is carried out and shows the great potential of NURBS functions for DIC.