Active Slip System Identification in Polycrystalline Metals by Digital Image Correlation (DIC)

In this paper, a novel approach was proposed to increase the confidence of active slip system identification in polycrystalline metals. The approach takes advantage of microscale deformation tracking via Digital Image Correlation (DIC) combined with scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The experimentally-obtained high-resolution deformation fields were mapped to an undeformed configuration, which gives slip traces suitable for comparison with undeformed crystal orientation data. A metric, named herein as the ‘relative displacement ratio’ (RDR), is calculated from the displacement fields near slip traces to characterize the localized deformation due to slip. In validation cases, the experimentally-measured RDRs matched well with RDRs theoretically-calculated from active slip systems. In test cases, active slip system identification by incorporating RDR as an additional constraint was demonstrated to be preferable to using Schmid factor alone as a constraint. The proposed approach supplements existing techniques for slip system identification with increased confidence.