Optical Flow Method for Measuring Deformation of Soil Specimen Subjected to Torsional Shearing

TL;DR

This paper introduces an optical flow method to measure small soil deformations during torsional shearing tests, revealing non-linear displacement distribution and potential overestimation of shear modulus in traditional methods.

Contribution

It applies a novel optical flow technique with SIFT features to analyze soil deformation, providing more accurate insights into deformation distribution during torsional shearing.

Findings

Displacement distribution deviates from linearity.

Shear modulus G may be overestimated in TS tests.

Optical flow results validated with PIV.

Abstract

In this study optical flow method was used for soil small deformation measurement in laboratory tests. The main objective was to observe how the deformation distributes along the whole height of cylindrical soil specimen subjected to torsional shearing (TS test). The experiments were conducted on dry non-cohesive soil specimens under two values of isotropic pressure. Specimens were loaded with low-amplitude cyclic torque to analyze the deformation within the small strain range (0.001-0.01%). Optical flow method variant by Ce Liu (2009) was used for motion estimation from series of images. This algorithm uses scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) for image feature extraction and coarse-to-fine matching scheme for faster calculations. The results were validated with the Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV). The results show that the displacement distribution deviates from commonly assumed linearity. Moreover, the observed deformation mechanisms analysis suggest that the shear modulus $G$ commonly determined through TS tests can be considerably overestimated.