Computationally efficient method of tracking fibres in composite materials using digital image correlation

A computationally efficient method based on digital image correlation (DIC) has been introduced in this paper for fast and accurate characterisation of fibre orientation fields from a series of optical mosaics of a continuous fibre-reinforced composite (CFRC) specimen, which were obtained using a well-established automated serial sectioning technique. The newly developed method has the capability of determining fibre paths from the sequence of mosaics in scenarios where the serial section spacing between the adjacent mosaics is atypically large, resulting in shifts in the fibre locations on the order of 90 pixels or twelve fibre diameters. The performance of the proposed method was quantitatively compared with a state-of-the-art fibre-tracking algorithm based on a Kalman filter, by applying them to the mosaic sequences from two CFRC material specimens. It was demonstrated from the fibre-tracking results that the proposed DIC-based method outperformed the Kalman filter algorithm in terms of both reliability and speed.