Determination of flexural stiffness of composite timber beams using DIC and wavelet transform of deflection lines

Abstract

The article presents an experiment of four-point bending of timber I-beams, the deflections of which were measured using digital image correlation (DIC). The deflection functions were subjected to a wavelet transform operation, which used the second derivative of the Gaussian distribution to determine the curvature of the beams’ axis. On this basis, the distribution of flexural stiffness of the elements was estimated, showing the potential usefulness of the DIC technique in production control and laboratory testing of prefabricated timber elements. The limitations of the proposed research method related to the need to perform numerical integration operations on discrete experimental data subject to measurement errors are also presented