Automated identification of slip system activity fields from digital image correlation data

Crystallographic slip system identification methods are widely employed to characterize the fine scale deformation of metals. While powerful, they usually rely on the occurrence of discrete slip bands with clear slip traces and can struggle when complex mechanisms such as cross-slip, curved slip, diffuse slip and/or intersecting slip occur. This paper proposes a novel slip system identification framework, termed SSLIP (for Slip Systems based Local Identification of Plasticity), in which the measured displacement gradient fields (from Digital Image Correlation) are locally matched to the kinematics of one or multiple combined theoretical slip systems, based on the measured crystal orientations. To identify the amount of slip that conforms to the measured kinematics, an optimization problem is solved for every datapoint individually, resulting in a slip activity field for every considered slip system. The identification framework is demonstrated and validated on an HCP virtual experiment, for discrete and diffuse slip, incorporating 24 slip systems. Experimental case studies on FCC and BCC metals show how full-field identification of discrete slip, diffuse slip and cross-slip becomes feasible, even when considering 48 slip systems for BCC. Moreover, the methodology is extended into a dedicated cross-slip identification method, which directly yields the orientation of the local slip plane trace orientation, purely based on the measured kinematics and on one or two chosen slip directions. For even more challenging cases revealing a persistent uncertainty in the slip identification, a two-step identification approach can be employed, as is demonstrated on a highly challenging HCP virtual experiment.