NASA Technology Licensing Webinars
NASA's Color-Filtering Software for Woven Material Strain Analysis Webinar
Innovators at NASA Johnson Space Center have developed a technology that can isolate a single direction of tensile strain in biaxially woven material. This is accomplished using traditional digital image correlation (DIC) techniques in combination with custom red-green-blue (RGB) color filtering software. DIC is a software-based method used to measure and characterize surface deformation and strain of an object. This technology was originally developed to enable the extraction of circumferential and longitudinal webbing strain information from material comprising the primary restraint layer that encompasses inflatable space structures. Whereas traditional methods of monochrome DIC can only measure strain in each of the biaxial directions separately, this DIC with RGB color filtering technology can measure strain in a single analysis. The analysis process begins by applying a speckled pattern to the subject material to which multiple photographic images are generated from a set of stereo cameras. These images are correlated/analyzed in post-processing to determine relative displacement of the speckles across a surface when testing for tensile strain. Traditional DIC software assumes a solid material substrate, but in interwoven materials the substrate consists of bi-directional patterns. This causes errors in strain data derived when the analysis is performed by DIC software alone. https://technology.nasa.gov/patent/MSC-TOPS-134
