Desenvolvimento de um programa computacional visando o aprimoramento do uso da técnica da fotoelasticidade

Abstract

Photoelasticity is an important technique to the mechanics stress analysis in complex geometry structures and exposed to equally complex loads. Such technique is based in the principle in which some materials present different refraction index when subjected to load. When the part is crossed by a polarized light beam in the opposite face it is possible to visualize colored fringes whose appearance is related to the stress to which the structure is exposed. The analysis of the colored fringes image of the part is an indirect measure of mechanical stress. Despite the advances in photoelasticity, it is still widely used the semiquantitative analysis by calculating the stress in the part to pre-determined points which somehow submits the colors analysis to the inaccuracy from the human eye, compromising repeatability and reproducibility of the experiment. In order to overcome this adversity, software was developed for analysis of the entire image area through the univocal identification of the colors of the fringes. The software was developed using the basic concepts of image processing such as connectivity pixels and edge detection, besides a design using a color space created by the International Commission on Illumination. Using this computational tool, it was possible to obtain results of the average shear stress in the structure from the analysis of all pixels in the image, something almost inconceivable to be manually done by the traditional methodology.