Experimental characterization of a smart material via DIC

When no extensometer is available in a generic tensile-compression test carried out by a universal testing machine (for instance the model BIONIX from Material Testing Systems (MTS)), the test results only provide the relative displacement between the machine grips. The test does not provide any information on the local behaviour of the material. This contribution presents the potential of an application of Digital Image Correlation (DIC) toward the reconstruction of the behaviour along the specimen. In particular, the authors test a Ni-Ti shape memory alloys (SMA) specimen with emphasis on the coupling of the two measurement techniques.