Assessment of 2D Digital Image Correlation for Experimental Modal Analysis of Transient Response of Beams Using a Continuous Wavelet Transform Method

The modal parameters of structures, and in particular their mode shapes, are generally determined based on the measurement of accelerometers or laser vibrometers. However, these sensors do not allow the performance of full-field measurements. In this study, the free vibration of a beam triggered by a shock is investigated using a high-speed camera with high image definition. With the help of digital image correlation (DIC), the beam displacement fields are deduced from the images. To analyse the DIC measurement quality, different tests and analyses are performed. First, the systematic errors and uncertainties in the DIC calculation for a simple translation are analysed considering different speckles. Then, tests on two configurations of a vibrating beam are filmed and full-field displacement measurements are computed. The modal parameters of the beam are deduced from these measurements using a continuous wavelet transform method. Particular care was taken to adapt the method to the post-processing of the numerous and noisy signals obtained for these experiments. All the steps of the post-processing are detailed in this paper. Finally, the modal parameters obtained with the proposed method are compared with those obtained in a more classical way using accelerometers and from the beam theory. In particular, the comparison of the signal-to-noise ratio of the different measurement methods is discussed.