Reconstruction of full-field complex deformed shapes of thin-walled special-section beam structures based on in situ strain measurement

This study proposed a method capable of reconstructing complex deformations of thin-walled special-section beam structures subjected to highly coupled loading cases, in terms of the combination of tension/compression, biaxial bending, and warping torsion. The complex beam deformation was decoupled, depending on axial strain measurement strategy on beam surface, and leads to reconstructed full-field displacements (deformed shapes) as the linear superposition of deformations subject to individual loading types. Full-filed strain/stress distributions can then be derived based on the reconstructed displacements. Particular efforts were focused on reconstructing beam deformation subject to warping torsion, where both rotations angles and warping displacements across the beam cross-section and along the beam length were identified precisely. As a proof-of-concept validation, the effectiveness of the method was examined using finite element analysis, where the deformed shape of a thin-walled hat-section beam under the coupling between uniaxial bending and warping torsion was reconstructed., Experiments were conducted subsequently to reconstruct deformation of an aluminum hat-section beam using distributed optical fiber sensors for the measurement of axial strains on the beam surface. The reconstructed full-field deformed shapes of the beam were compared with the three-dimensional displacement signals captured using a non-contact digital image correlation system. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology for complex deformation reconstruction is possible to be extended to a variety of thin-walled beam-type structures which are typical in civil and aerospace engineering, showing potential contributions in fields such as on-line structural health monitoring and active structural control.