Experimental multiscale measurements for the mechanical identification of a cortical bone by digital image correlation

The implementation of the experimental methodology by optical measurements of mechanical fields, the development of a test bench, the specimen preparation, the experimental measurements, and the digital image correlation (DIC) method, have already been the object of research in the context of biological materials. Nevertheless, in the framework of the experimental identification of a mesoscopic stochastic model of the random apparent elasticity field, measurements of one specimen is required at both the macroscopic scale and the mesoscopic scale under one single loading. The nature of the cortical bone induces some difficulties, as no single speckled pattern technique is available for simultaneously obtaining the displacement at the macroscopic scale and at the mesoscopic scale. In this paper, we present a multiscale experimental methodology based on (i) an experimental protocol for one specimen of a cortical bone, (ii) its measuring bench, (iii) optical field measurements by DIC method, (iv) the experimental results, and (v) the multiscale experimental identification by solving a statistical inverse problem.