ABSTRACT--This is the second paper in a series of three devoted to the application of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) to mechanics problems. In this paper, improvements to the digital image correlation method are outlined, a technique that compares digital images of a specimen surface before and after deformation to deduce its two-dimensional surface displacement field and strains. The necessity of using the framework of large deformation theory for accurately addressing rigid body rotations to reduce associated errors in the strain components is pointed out. In addition, the algorithm is extended to compute the three-dimensional surface displacement field from STM data; also, significant improvements are achieved in the rate as well as the robustness of the convergence. For (STM) topographs, the resolution yields 4.8 nm for the in-plane and 1.5 nm for the out-of-plane displacement components spanning an area of 10 Ixm x 10 Ixm.

ABSTRACT--A new experimental method has been developed for studying deformations of micromechanical material systems at the submicron scale. To that end, a special digital scanning tunneling microscope (STM) was designed to be coupled to a mechanically deforming specimen. Operating in constant current mode, this digitally controlled STM records detailed topographies of specimen surfaces with a resolution of 10 nm in-plane and 7 nm out-of-plane over a 10 lax 10 ~t area. Three-dimensional displacement field information is extracted by comparing topographies of the same specimen area before and after deformation by way of a modified digital image correlation algorithm. The resolution of this (combined) displacement measuring method was assessed on translation and uniaxial tensile tests to be 5 nm for in-plane displacement components and 1.5 nm for out-of-plane motion over the same area. This is the first paper in a series of three in which the authors delineate the main features of this specially designed microscope and describe how it is constituted, calibrated and used with the improved version of the digital image correlation method to determine deformations in a test specimen at the nanoscaJe.

ABSTRACT--Planar digital image correlation has been extended to measure surface deformations of cylindrical specimens without physical contact for high-temperature situations. A single CCD camera acquires the surface image patterns of a section of a specimen in the undeformed and deformed states to determine two-dimensional displacements on a projection plane, Axial, circumferential and shear deformations are determined through curvature transformation on the twodimensional projection displacement field. The resolution of this technique was determined for a cylinder of 22.23-mm diameter to be 3.5 txm for the axial displacement, 0.05 percent for the axial and shear strains and 0.08 percent for the circumferential strain when correlation computations are carried out over a field of 5 mm • 5 mm.