On the future of experimental mechanics in the digital world: An eikological perspective

Quantitative imaging is at the heart of the renewal of experimental mechanics. Through a multitude of modalities and scales, it allows the structural characterization to be enriched by its kinematic expression under mechanical but also multiphysical loadings, in two or three dimensional in situ configurations. It also concerns materials from the finest scales to engineering structures. Kinematic and thermal measurements extracted from these imaging tools may be linked to mechanical models by exploiting their synergy, namely, experimental measurements feed models, which in turn enable for the measurement of mechanically significant quantities in a set of images and experimental data.

As (very) big data providers, experiments contribute to the current and future developments of mechanical sciences. This paper discusses how experimental mechanics has benefited from the use of images to analyze experiments, and the related challenges that still arise, in particular, for digital image correlation techniques.