ARTICLE IN PRESS

Optics and Lasers in Engineering 48 (2010) 841–848

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Optics and Lasers in Engineering

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/optlaseng

High-temperature deformation field measurement by combining transient

aerodynamic heating simulation system and reliability-guided digital
image correlation
Bing Pan a,n, Dafang Wu a, Yong Xia b
a
Institute of Solid Mechanics, Beijing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics, Beijing 100191, China
b
State Key Lab of Automotive Safety and Energy, Department of Automotive Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

a r t i c l e in fo abstract

Article history: To determine the full-field high-temperature thermal deformation of the structural materials used in
Received 18 March 2010 high-speed aerospace flight vehicles, a novel non-contact high-temperature deformation measurement
Received in revised form system is established by combining transient aerodynamic heating simulation device with the
22 April 2010
reliability-guided digital image correlation (RG-DIC). The test planar sample with size varying from
Accepted 22 April 2010
several mm2 to several hundreds mm2 can be heated from room temperature to 1100 1C rapidly and
Available online 7 May 2010
accurately using the infrared radiator of the transient aerodynamic heating simulation system. The
Keywords: digital images of the test sample surface at various temperatures are recorded using an ordinary optical
Digital image correlation imaging system. To cope with the possible local decorrelated regions caused by black-body radiation
High-temperature
within the deformed images at the temperatures over 450 1C, the RG-DIC technique is used to extract
Thermal deformation
full-field in-plane thermal deformation from the recorded images. In validation test, the thermal
Coefficient of thermal expansion
deformation fields and the values of coefficient of thermal expansion (CTEs) of a chromiumnickel
austenite stainless steel sample from room temperature to 550 1C is measured and compared with the
well-established handbook value, confirming the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed technique.
The experimental results reveal that the present system using an ordinary optical imaging system, is
able to accurately measure full-field thermal deformation of metals and alloys at temperatures not
exceeding 600 1C.
& 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
During high-speed flight, the structural materials used in high-
speed aerospace flight vehicle may be heated to a very high
temperature owing to transient aerodynamic heating. Deformation
measurement of a heated sample due to transient thermal and/or
mechanical loading is essential for the determination of its thermal
physical properties and mechanical properties, and is also important
to the proper selection and development of the materials applied in
high-speed fight vehicles. Basically, accurate measurement of high-
temperature thermal deformation of materials and structures faces
two main challenges: (1) how to exert thermal loading to simulate
high-temperature environment and (2) how to measure the surface
deformation of test sample induced by thermal and/or mechanics
loads. In order to simulate high-temperature environment, existing
works normally employ high-temperature furnace or ohmic heating
to exert thermal load. The high-temperature furnace with tungsten
heater is able to exert thermal load accurately but with relatively
lower heating and cooling rates due to a relatively large thermal
n
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: panb04@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn (B. Pan).
inertia of the sample chamber, while the ohmic heating is capable of
rapid heating (the maximum heating rate can achieve 800 1C/s), but
with difficulty in controlling the applied temperature evenly and
accurately across the test sample. Obviously, these existing
apparatuses are not suitable for the thermal deformation measure-
ment of materials subject to transient thermal shock, which requires
both accurate and rapid heating. To deal with the other challenge,
i.e., accurate measurement of thermal deformation of the heat
sample surface, both conventional contact techniques and advanced
non-contact optical techniques have been proposed. Conventionally,
high-temperature strain is measured by contact strain gauges and
extensometer. Although high-temperature strain gauge and exten-
sor can sustain very high temperature, these two techniques can
only provide the average thermal strain of the local area and are not
suitable for full-field thermal deformation measurement. Besides,
the contact between the strain sensitive elements may more or less
reinforce the test sample locally. In contrast, high-temperature
deformation measurement using non-contact optical techniques is
more appealing as they can effectively overcome the shortcomings
of the contact techniques.
In literature, various non-contact optical techniques, involving
Interferometric Strain/Displacement Gauge (ISDG) [1], video
extensometer based on digital image processing [2,3], Electronic

0143-8166/$ - see front matter & 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.optlaseng.2010.04.007
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842 B. Pan et al. / Optics and Lasers in Engineering 48 (2010) 841–848
Speckle Pattern Interferometry (ESPI) [4,5], Moiré Interferometry
(MI) [6], Laser Speckle Correlation (LSC) [7] and Digital Image
Correlation (DIC) [8,9], have been proposed for high-temperature
thermal deformation measurement. Some of these techniques,
e.g., the video extensometer used by Volkl et al. [2,3] and the LSC
technique established by Anwander et al. [7] are able to provide
thermal and mechanical strains at ultra-high temperature up to
1200 1C. However, these two techniques are unable to provide
full-field thermal deformation measurement, since they only
determine the average thermal strain between two markers or
speckle granules. Compared to other optical techniques used for
high-temperature deformation measurement, the full-field DIC
technique is more desirable with the following advantages:
(1) simple optical arrangement, experimental set-up and easy
specimen preparation (compared with ISDG, ESPI, MI and
LSC);
(2) full-field measurements (compared with ISDG, video extens-
ometer, LSC) and
(3) does not require coherent laser source and vibration-proof
optical platform, thus suitable for both laboratory and field
measurements (compared with ISDG, MI, ESPI and LSC).
It is noted that Lyons et al. [8] was the first to measure the full-
field deformation using DIC at high temperature. They success-
fully determined the thermally and mechanically induced stains
of an Inconel 718 alloy at temperatures up to 650 1C. In the use of
DIC for high-temperature strain measurement, it is observed that
when the applied temperature exceeds certain scope, self-
radiation of the heated sample leads to serious decorrelation
effect. To deal with this challenge, very recently, an effective
method was also developed [9] to obtain high-quality digital
image at temperatures through the use of band-pass filter and
blue illumination. However, in these published works using DIC
for high-temperature deformation measurement, a commercial or
self-developed high-temperature furnace equipped with an
observation window was employed to heat the sample to a
desired temperature. As pointed out in Ref. [8], the variations in
the refractive index of the heated air and the imperfectness of the
optical window have a strong influence on the measured
displacement fields DIC. Also, due to the limited size of the
high-temperature chamber, the specimen used in these commer-
cial high-temperature furnaces is normally very limited and are
not suitable for thermal deformation of an object with relatively
large or complex geometry.
Fig. 1. Schematic drawing of the non-contact high-temperature deformation measuring system by combining infrared heating and digital image correlation technique.
In this paper, a novel yet practical non-contact full-field
thermal deformation measuring system is established by combin-
ing transient aerodynamic heating simulation device with the
recently developed reliability-guided digital image correlation
(RG-DIC) technique. In the proposed technique, the specimen can
be heated accurately and rapidly with the infrared radiator of the
transient aerodynamic heating simulation system. The applied
temperature ranges from room temperature to 1100 1C with a
reading accuracy of 0.1 1C under the closed-loop control from a
thermocouple. Since the test specimen does not need to be placed
into the high-temperature furnace, thus the errors associated with
variation in heated air and imperfect observe glass can be entirely
avoided. In experiment, the digital images of the test sample
surface at various temperatures are recorded using an ordinary
optical imaging system and subsequently processed by the
RG-DIC technique to extract full-filed in-plane thermal deforma-
tion. For verification, the thermal deformation and coefficient of
thermal expansion (CTE) of a chromiumnickel austenite stainless
steel sample is measured and compared with the literature value,
confirming the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed
technique. The experimental results reveal that the proposed
technique without special filtering imaging equipment is able to
accurately extract full-field thermal deformation at the tempera-
ture range of room temperature up to 550 1C.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: in Section 2,
the test set-up and experimental details are described. In
Section 3, the in-plane strain mapping technique based on
RG-DIC is reviewed. In Section 4, the established technique is
verified by extracting the thermal deformation and CTE values
of a chromiumnickel austenite stainless steel sample. The
limitation and future development of the present technique
are also discussed in this section. In Section 5, we conclude
the paper.
2. Measuring system and experimental details
2.1. Experimental set-up
The proposed non-contact high-temperature thermal defor-
mation measurement system consists of a transient aerodynamic
heating simulation device and a digital image capturing
system, as schematically shown in Fig. 1. Shown in the left part
of Fig. 1 is the transient aerodynamic heating simulation device,
which is able to heat the test sample from room temperature to
1100 1C with a reading accuracy of 0.1 1C under the closed-loop
 ARTICLE IN PRESS
B. Pan et al. / Optics and Lasers in Engineering 48 (2010) 841–848
control from a thermocouple. The transient aerodynamic heating
simulation device comprises an infrared radiator, a thermocouple,
a signal amplifier, an A/D converter, a D/A converter, and a control
computer. During service, the surface temperature of the test
sample is detected by the thermocouple attached to the back side
or front side of the sample surface; then the analog signal of
temperature is amplified and transferred into digital signal using
the A/D transfer. The detected temperature is then compared with
the preset temperature to compute their difference, which will be
set to computer program to determine the control value. The
digital controlled quality is converted to analog signal to activate
the electric power adjustment device. By adjusting the input
electric power, the temperature of the test sample surface can be
accurately controlled within 0.1 1C. Compared with conventional
high-temperature furnace, the transient aerodynamic heating
simulation device offers a capability of rapid heating speed with
high accuracy [10]. Since the thermal couple directly detects
the surface temperature of the test sample rather than the
ambient air temperature, the applied thermal loading will be
more accurate and stable. The image acquisition system is used
to record the surface images of the test sample at various
temperatures, which consists of a CMOS camera (1302UM,
Daheng Image Co., Ltd., Beijing, China) with a resolution of
1280  1024 pixels at 256 gray levels and a zoom lens (SL08551,
AVENIR, f¼12.5–75 mm). The image acquisition system is placed
in front of the test sample with its optical axis normal to the
sample surface.
2.2. Experimental preparation
To ensure reliable measurements using the DIC technique,
natural or artificial speckle patterns with random variations of
gray level intensity must be made on the test specimen surface as
a carrier of deformation information. In high-temperature
deformation measurement, the fabrication of speckle pattern is
critical to the final measurements, considering that the speckle
pattern made by spraying common decorative paints normally
burns out when environmental temperature above 250 1C. In the
work, a simple yet effective speckle pattern fabrication technique
was developed for high-temperature deformation measurement
purpose by blending black cobalt oxide with the liquid composition
of a commercial high-temperature inorganic adhesive (Ak04-4,
Beijing Aoyuksin Surface Engineering Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing,
China) to yield a black liquid. The black liquid can be easily
splashed onto the test sample surface to form artificial random
speckle pattern. Experimental results show that the speckle
pattern made with this approach is able to sustain high
temperature exceeding 1100 1C without any change in shape.
o x
P (x0, y0)
y y
Reference subset Q (xi, yj)
Reference image
Fig. 2. An example of tracking the reference subset in the deformed image using DIC, the center position of the target subset is obtained through searching the peak
position of the distribution of correlation coefficient.
843
Then the sample with artificial speckle pattern on its surface was
placed vertically on the sample stage without fixation, and white
cold light source was used to illuminate the surface. Subse-
quently, the focus length of the camera was adjusted to acquire a
clear image of the sample surface. It should be noted that the
F-number of the imaging lens was set to maximum value to
obtain a small aperture size with largest depth of field during the
experiment.
2.3. Experimental procedure
Thermal deformation measurement of metals and alloys using
the proposed technique follows the below procedures. First, the
test sample, with artificial speckle patterns on its surface, is
placed vertically on the holder in front of the infrared radiator of
the transient aerodynamic heating simulation system without any
fixation. Then, the original temperature is set as 20 1C (a little high
than the room temperature) and the corresponding image is
recorded as reference image. Subsequently, the test sample was
heated to preset temperatures and a series of deformed images
were recorded after the desired temperatures are stable. The
digital images of the test sample surface at various temperatures
are recorded and subsequently processed by DIC technique to
extract full-field thermal displacements and strains.
3. Thermal deformation measurement via DIC
3.1. Principles of reliability-guided digital image correlation
As an easy-to-implement yet powerful optical metrology, DIC
has been increasingly used in the field of experimental mechanics
for deformation field characterization as well as mechanical
properties determination of various materials and structures
[11–13]. In principle, DIC is an image-based non-contact optical
metrology based on digital image processing and numerical
computing, it directly provides full-field in-plane displacement
and strain fields of the test planar specimen surface by comparing
the digital images of the specimen surface acquired before and
after deformation [14]. The basic principle of DIC technique is
schematically illustrated in Fig. 2. It should be noted first that the
test specimen surface must be covered with random speckle
pattern in the DIC technique, which serves as a carrier of
deformation information [15,16]. Normally, to track an image
point of reference image in the deformed image, a small square
reference subset of (2M+ 1)  (2M+ 1) pixels centered at the
current point is chosen. Moreover, to accurately track the
position of the selected reference subset in the deformed image,
o x
Displacement vector
P’ (x0’, y0’)
Target subset Q’ (xi’, yj’)
Deformed image
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844 B. Pan et al. / Optics and Lasers in Engineering 48 (2010) 841–848

a cross-correlation criterion or sum-of-squared-difference subset center and the target subset center yield the in-plane
criterion must be established to evaluate the similarity or displacement vector at the interrogated point. In practical
difference between the selected reference subset and the target implementation of DIC, a region of interest (ROI) with regular or
subset. In this work, the following zero-mean normalized sum of irregular shape must be specified first in the reference image. In
squared difference (ZNSSD) criterion, which is actually equivalent order to achieve high spatial resolution of displacement field, the
to the most widely used zero-mean normalized cross-correlation specified ROI is further divided into evenly spaced virtual grids,
criterion (ZNCC) [17], is used: and the displacements are estimated at each point of the virtually
2 grids to obtain the full-field deformation fields.
XM XM
6 f ðx,yÞfm As will be shown later, when the temperature of the heated
CZNSSD ðPÞ ¼ 4qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
PM PM 2 sample exceeds certain extent, the corresponding digital image
x ¼ M y ¼ M x ¼ M y ¼ M ½f ðx,yÞfm 
contains some local decorrelated regions (Fig. 3(d)), which have
32
the serious decorrelation effects caused by the black-body
gðx0 ,y0 Þgm 7 radiation of the heated sample. In such a case, the conventional
 qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
PM PM 5 ð1Þ
½gðx 0 ,y0 Þg 2 DIC technique is prone to yield erroneous results due to a
x ¼ M y ¼ M m
pointwise calculation scheme along each line or row [20]. In this
work, to deal with the potential decorrelated local areas, the
where f(x, y) is the gray level intensity at coordinates (x, y) in the recently developed universally applicable RG-DIC technique
reference subset of the reference image and g(x0 , y0 ) is the gray [20,21] is used to process the deformed images. In the RG-DIC
level intensity at coordinates (x0 , y0 ) in the target subsets of the technique, a scanning strategy guided by the zero-mean
P PM
deformed image, fm ¼ 1=ð2M þ 1Þ2 M x ¼ M y ¼ M ½f ðx,yÞ and normalized cross-correlation (ZNCC) coefficient of computed
P P
gm ¼ 1=ð2M þ 1Þ2 M x ¼ M
M 0 0
y ¼ M ½gðx ,y Þ are the mean intensity points is employed instead of the conventional pointwise
values of reference and target subsets, respectively. P denotes the scanning strategy. As a result of this approach, the possible
desired vector with respect to displacement mapping function error propagation related to conventional DIC technique can be
used. entirely avoided, and the RG-DIC technique can give correct
The core of the DIC technique lies in the optimization of the results by automatically isolating the decorrelated points.
defined correlation function between the two subsets (i.e., the
reference subset and the target subset) over the deformation
parameter vector P used to depict the shape and position of the 3.2. Calculation of thermal strains
target subset. Once the correlation coefficient extreme is detected
using certain optimization algorithm (e.g., the Newton–Raphson Although the displacement gradients (i.e., strains) can be
algorithm [18,19]), the position of the deformed subset can be directly calculated using certain kinds of iterative optimization
determined, and the differences of the positions of the reference algorithms (e.g., the Newton–Raphson algorithm [17,18], the

Subset T =20°C T =400°C

Region of interest

740pixels
(40.57mm)

1000pixels (60.17mm)

T =550°C T =600°C

Fig. 3. Captured surface speckle image of the test stainless steel specimen using an ordinary optical imaging system at temperature of (a) 20 1C, (b) 400 1C, (c) 550 1C and
(d) 600 1C. The area inside the rectangle of reference image (a) denotes the region of interest and where the thermal deformation and average in-plane strains are
calculated. The image (d) clearly indicates the decorrelation effect caused by the black-body radiation of the heated sample at 600 1C.
 ARTICLE IN PRESS
B. Pan et al. / Optics and Lasers in Engineering 48 (2010) 841–848
iterative least-squares algorithm [22]), large variations in the
calculated displacement gradients indicated that they cannot be
directly used as reliable strain measurement. By comparison, a
pointwise local least-squares fitting technique employed by Pan
et al. [22] and Lava et. al. [23] is a more practical approach for full-
field thermal strain estimation from the noisy displacement fields.
In the PLS technique for full-field strain estimation, to compute
the local strains of a point, a local square window, also called
strain calculation window, containing (2N+ 1)  (2N+1) discrete
points centered at the current point is selected. If the strain
calculation window is small enough, the displacement distribu-
tions in it can be reasonably assumed to be a linear plane, and
therefore can be expressed by
uðx,yÞ ¼ a0 þa1 x þ a2 y
vðx,yÞ ¼ b0 þ b1 x þ b2 y
where x, y ¼  N: N are the local coordinates within the strain
calculation window, u(x, y) and v(x, y) are the original displace-
ments obtained by DIC, and ai ¼ 0,1,2, bi ¼ 0,1,2 are the unknown
polynomial coefficients to be determined, which can be estimated
by minimizing the following least-squares functions:
X
w2 ða0 ,a1 ,a2 Þ ¼ ½uðx,yÞða0 þ a1 x þ a2 yÞ2 ð3Þ
x,y A Ws
X performance of plasticity, ductility and extrusion. The chemical
w2 ðb0 ,b1 ,b2 Þ ¼ ½vðx,yÞðb0 þb1 x þ b2 yÞ2
x,y A Ws
where Ws denotes the set of valid data points within the local
strain calculation window. Once the unknown polynomial
coefficients are determined, the local strains ex, ey, Yxy and local
rigid body rotation o at the interrogated point can thus be
calculated asex ¼ @u=@x ¼ a1 , ey ¼ @v=@y ¼ b2 , gxy ¼ 1=2ð@v=@x
þ@u=@yÞ ¼ 1=2ðb1 þ a2 Þ, o ¼ 1=2ð@v=@x@u=@yÞ ¼ 1=2ðb1 a2 Þ.
Indeed, the averaged strain at each calculated points can also
be taken as the average thermal strain for the homogeneously
expanded material [24,25]. Quite different from this approach, in
this work, in order to obtain the average thermal strain of the test
film surface undergone homogeneous thermal deformation and to
better alleviate the influence of noise, linear planes were used to
approximate the entire computed displacement fields of the test
film. Thus, the Ws given in Eqs. (3) and (4) denotes the ensemble
of all valid data points of the entire displacements field. It is also
necessary to mention that the determined small rotation angle
(i.e., o) can be used to eliminate the unavoidable in-plane
rotation during free thermal expansion of test material [26] to
show the pure thermal expansion of the test sample.
3.3. Determination of coefficient of thermal expansion
After obtaining the discrete thermal strains associated at
various temperatures using the approach described above, the
CTE of test sample materials can therefore be determined
analytically by fitting the strain data with a quadratic polynomial
[27], which is in the following form:
eðTÞ ¼ A þBT þ CT 2
where A, B, C are the desired coefficients, and can be estimated
using least-squares fitting. Once these fitting coefficients are
Table 1
Chemical composition of the chromiumnickel austenite stainless steel.
C Mn Si Cr
r0.12 r2.00 r 0.80 17.00–19.00
845
determined, the CTE value can therefore be computed as a
function of temperature:
deðTÞ
aðTÞ ¼ ¼ B þ 2CT ð6Þ
dT
where a are the desired CTE values as a function of temperature.
It is clear that the accuracy of the determined CTE depends on the
accuracy of the applied temperature and the strain estimation
accuracy of DIC.
4. Experimental validation
ð2Þ
4.1. Material and experiment
In order to verify the performance of the proposed technique
for high-temperature thermal deformation measurement, a
chromiumnickel austenite stainless steel sample of size
100  100  2 mm3 was used as a reference sample. The chro-
miumnickel austenite stainless steel has been widely used as
structural material in aerospace engineering, due to its excellent
ð4Þ composition of this kind of stainless steel is listed in Table 1. The
reason why the chromiumnickel austenite stainless steel was
selected as the reference sample is that its CTE values have also
been well characterized in China Aeronautical Materials
Handbook [28].
According to the experimental procedures described above, a
reference image at 20 1C was captured first as shown in Fig. 3(a).
Afterwards, with a temperature step of 50 1C, the images of
deformed sample were consecutively recorded at twelve
temperatures in the range of 50–600 1C. Fig. 3(b)–(d) illustrates
the digital images recorded at 400, 550 and 600 1C, respectively.
By comparison with the reference image (i.e., Fig. 3(a)), a number
of local decorrelated regions can be clearly observed in Fig. 3(c).
Besides, it can also be seen from Fig. 3(d) that when the
sample temperature reaches 600 1C, the black-body radiation
intensifies markedly and suppresses the illumination lighting,
which leads to serious decorrelation effect between the current
image and the reference image. In this case, the DIC calculation
between the two images fails since most of the carrier of
deformation information (i.e., speckle pattern) fades away. Due
to this reason, only the eleven target images acquired at
temperature range from 50 to 550 1C were analyzed using
RG-DIC technique to extract the thermal deformation induced
by thermal loading.
During the analysis of these image using RG-DIC, a rectangular
area in the middle of the reference image, as shown in Fig. 3(a), is
chosen to be the region of interest. The displacements were
calculated at a mesh of 38  51 points (corresponds to an area of
40.57  60.17 mm2) with subset size of 41  41 pixels and grid
step (distance between neighboring points) of 20 pixels. Totally,
the displacement components of 1938 (38  51) discrete points
ð5Þ
were analyzed using the DIC algorithm described in Section 3.1.
Later the average in-plane thermal strains of the region of interest
were calculated using the linear plane fitting approach.
Ni S P Ti
8.00–11.00 r 0.025 r 0.025 5(C  0.02)–0.8
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846 B. Pan et al. / Optics and Lasers in Engineering 48 (2010) 841–848

4.2. Results and discussion
The calculated u and v displacement fields at temperature of
50 1C are shown in Fig. 4(a) and (b), respectively, in which the
displacements associated with small rigid body translation and
rigid body rotation of the sample has been eliminated by use of
the technique developed in our previous work [26]. It is seen from
Fig. 4(a) and (b) that the contour lines of u and v displacement
fields are approximately parallel to y and x axes as expected.
The equally spaced contour lines of Fig. 4(a) and (b) clearly
demonstrate a homogeneous thermal expansion in x and y
direction. Additionally, the average thermal strains in x and y
direction are nearly identical with calculated exx ¼433 and
eyy ¼456 me, respectively. Fig. 4(c) shows that displacement
vector field of the thermal expansion. The superimposed
contour lines in Fig. 4(c) denote the magnitude of the radial
displacement vector. Because the thermal expansion of the
chromiumnickel austenite stainless steel sample is rather small
at the temperature of 50 1C (the maximum displacement is about
0.25 pixels), the saw-tooth fluctuations in the contour lines due to
the influence of noise are clearly observed.
In a similar manner, the x-directional displacement field,
y-directional displacement field, the displacement vector fields
along with the radial displacement contours of the chromium-
nickel austenite stainless steel sample at temperature of 400 1C
were analyzed as shown in Fig. 5(a)–(c), respectively. At the
temperature of 400 1C, the maximum radial displacement
associated with pure thermal expansion achieves 3.5 pixels.
Based on the determined thermal deformation fields, the average
thermal strains in x and y direction are calculated exx ¼7323 and
eyy ¼7448 me, respectively. From Fig. 5, an apparent homogeneous
thermal expansion can be more clearly viewed.
In this experiment, we observe that, at temperature over
450 1C, the captured digital image contains a number of regions
with serious decorrelation effect compared with their reference
state. Consequently, the computed ZNCC correlation coefficients
of these decorrelated points are lessened greatly. In this case, the
conventional DIC technique fails to provide correct thermal
displacement field as well as the thermal strains. However, as
the RG-DIC algorithm can automatically isolate the points within
these decorrelated local regions and bring no influence on other
points [20], the x-directional displacement field, y-directional

-0.2 -0.15 -0.1 -0.05 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 -0.2 -0.15 -0.1 -0.05 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25

Fig. 4. Measured surface thermal deformation fields of the chromiumnickel austenite stainless steel sample at temperature of 50 1C after removing in-plane rotation and
rigid body translation: (a) u (horizontal) displacement field, (b) v (vertical) displacement field and (c) radial displacement vector superimposed on the radial displacement
contours.

-3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 -2 -1 0 1 2 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4

Fig. 5. Measured surface thermal deformation of the chromiumnickel austenite stainless steel sample at temperature of 400 1C after removing in-plane rotation and rigid
body translation: (a) u (horizontal) displacement field, (b) v (vertical) displacement field and (c) radial displacement vector superimposed on the radial displacement
contours.
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B. Pan et al. / Optics and Lasers in Engineering 48 (2010) 841–848 847

-4 -2 0 2 4 6 -6 -4 -2 0 2 4 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Fig. 6. Measured surface thermal deformation of the chromiumnickel austenite stainless steel sample at temperature of 550 1C after removing in-plane rotation and rigid
body translation: (a) u (horizontal) displacement field, (b) v (vertical) displacement field and (c) radial displacement vector superimposed on the radial displacement
contours. The void regions within the contour plots represent the points with serious decorrelation effect, whose correlation coefficients are lower than 0.8.

Fig. 7. Experimental temperature thermal strain data for stainless steel sample in Fig. 8. CTE values as a function of temperature calculated analytically from the
the temperature range of 20–550 1C. thermal strain fit. The inserted table displays the comparison between the
measured CTE values and published handbook data.

displacement field, the displacement vector fields along with the
radial displacement contours of the chromiumnickel austenite
stainless steel sample at temperature of 550 1C can also be
correctly analyzed as shown in (a)–(c), respectively. In Fig. 6, the
void regions within the contour plots represent the points with
serious decorrelation effect, which are reported with the
correlation coefficients lower than 0.8 and have been removed
from the contour plots. Based on the determined thermal
deformation fields given in Fig. 6(a) and (b), the average
thermal strains in x and y direction are calculated as exx ¼9047
and eyy ¼9273 me, respectively, using the aforementioned linear
plane fitting approach. Although a homogeneous thermal
deformation can be observed from Fig. 6, the saw-tooth
fluctuations in the contour lines are much more pronounced
than those shown in Fig. 5, which clearly indicates the
decorrelation effect and demonstrates the negative influences of
black-body radiation of the heated sample.
Fig. 7 presents the relationship curve of average normal
thermal strains as a function of temperature for the
chromiumnickel austenite stainless steel sample. Since the
measured two normal strains (i.e., exx and eyy) are nearly
identical, the thermal strains plotted in Fig. 7 are the average
values of exx and eyy. It is clear from Fig. 7 that the thermal
expansion increases almost linearly with the increase of exerted
temperature. The maximum surface thermal strain exceeds 9000
microstrains at the temperature of 550 1C.
To quantitatively calculate the CTEs of the test sample at
various temperatures, the experimental discrete temperature
thermal strain data is fitted with a quadratic polynomial, which
is also plotted in Fig. 7. The resulting polynomial is expressed as
eðTÞ ¼ 0:00109T 2 þ16:71T383:56, from which the CTE values as
a function of temperature can therefore be determined analyti-
cally as plotted in Fig. 8. Fig. 8 indicates that the CTE values
increases with the increase of the temperature. To quantitatively
verify the accuracy of the proposed high-temperature thermal
deformation measuring system, the measured CTE values of
stainless steel sample is compared with the existing record data in
Chinese Aeronautical Materials Handbook [28]. The comparison is
shown in the inserted table of Fig. 8, from which we can see that
the maximum difference is 0.3 ppm/1C. The perfect agreement
clearly confirms the accuracy of the proposed high-temperature
thermal deformation measuring system.
As pointed out in Refs. [14], the measurement of DIC relies
heavily on the quality of recorded digital images. In this work, we
observed that when the sample temperature exceeds 550 1C, the
intensity of black-body radiation intensifies and suppresses the
illumination lighting. As a consequence, the entire image recorded
in the temperature of 600 1C has a serious decorrelation effect
 ARTICLE IN PRESS
848 B. Pan et al. / Optics and Lasers in Engineering 48 (2010) 841–848
compared with the reference image. Generally speaking, the use
of a special camera, which is insensitive to the lights with
relatively long wavelength, may weaken the influence of black-
body radiation of the heated sample. However, as suggested by
Lyons et al. [8] and Grant et al. [9], the use of a filtered imaging
system coupled with proper illumination lighting is the most
effective technique to acquire high-quality image. Accordingly,
one of our future tasks will be improving our imaging system,
which is expected to allow the accurate measurement of the
deformation fields at temperatures over 600 1C.
5. Conclusion
The measurement of high-temperature thermal deformation is
an important task in the proper selection and development of the
materials used in high-speed flight vehicle. In this work, a
practical non-contact high-temperature deformation measuring
system is established by combining the non-contact optical
metrology, i.e., digital image correlation with transient aerody-
namic heating simulation system. The use of transient aerody-
namic heating system as heating device provides a better
environment for the non-contact deformation measurement by
avoiding the influence of imperfect observing window and
variations in refractive index of the air. The transient thermal
deformation measurement is also possible since the transient
aerodynamic heating system is able to provide a heating speed as
fast as 100 1C/min. By virtue of the RG-DIC technique, full-field
deformation field from the deformed images with local decorr-
elation effect can be correctly extracted. To validate the
performance of the system, the thermal deformation fields and
CTEs of a chromiumnickel austenite stainless steel sample at
different temperatures are measured and compared with the
existing literature value. The experimental results confirm the
effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed technique, and
demonstrate that with an ordinary imaging system, the proposed
technique is able to accurately extract full-field thermal deforma-
tion of metals and alloys at the temperature range of room
temperature up to 550 1C.
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by ‘‘Air hundred talents program of
Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics’’ and ‘‘the
Science Fund of State Key Laboratory of Automotive Safety and
Energy’’ (under Grant KF10041).
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