The application of high speed photography and white light speckle to the study of dynamic fracture

A white light speckle technique is combined with high speed photography to study the dynamic fracture of a sample of PMMA. A series of single exposure speckle patterns are photographically recorded at the rate of 2 × 10⁵ frames s^-1 during fracture of the sample. The displacement field around the tip of the propagating crack may then be determined by superimposing pairs of individual frames to form a ‘double-exposure’ speckle pattern. It is shown that the method gives values for the stress intensity factor K which are consistent with those obtained from other techniques.