Photogrammetric Process to Monitor Stress Fields Inside Structural Systems

This research employs displacement fields photogrammetrically captured on the surface of a solid or structure to estimate real-time stress distributions it undergoes during a given loading period. The displacement fields are determined based on a series of images taken from the solid surface while it experiences deformation. Image displacements are used to estimate the deformations in the plane of the beam surface, and Poisson’s Method is subsequently applied to reconstruct these surfaces, at a given time, by extracting triangular meshes from the corresponding points clouds. With the aid of the measured displacement fields, the Boundary Element Method (BEM) is considered to evaluate stress values throughout the solid. Herein, the unknown boundary forces must be additionally calculated. As the photogrammetrically reconstructed deformed surfaces may be defined by several million points, the boundary displacement values of boundary-element models having a convenient number of nodes are determined based on an optimized displacement surface that best fits the real measured data. The results showed the effectiveness and potential application of the proposed methodology in several tasks to determine real-time stress distributions in structures.