QUASI-STATIC AND DYNAMIC BEHAVIOR OF VANADIUM-CARBIDE REINFORCED ALUMINUM ALLOY STUDIED VIA DIGITAL IMAGE CORRELATION – PRELIMINARY STUDY

Vanadium-carbide reinforced aluminum alloys have attracted significant interest in recent years due to their enhanced strength-to-weight ratio, improved fatigue resistance, and refined microstructural stability, making them promising materials for lightweight protective structures and high-performance engineering applications. The addition of vanadium carbide promotes grain refinement and precipitation strengthening, which can substantially improve mechanical performance under different loading regimes. The mechanical response of aluminum alloys is strongly dependent on the strain rate, with dynamic loading often leading to increased flow stress and reduced ductility compared to quasi-static conditions. Investigations of aluminum alloys such as 6005A-T6 and 5083 have shown that these materials exhibit notable strain rate sensitivity, which must be taken into account in structural design and numerical modeling. Full-field optical measurement techniques, particularly Digital Image Correlation (DIC), have become indispensable in characterizing strain localization and deformation behavior in both quasi-static and high-strain-rate testing. Ultra-highspeed DIC has been successfully applied to capture deformation fields during impact events such as Taylor impact tests, providing detailed insight into localized plasticity and failure mechanisms. Moreover, DIC has been extensively used to assess the formability of aluminum alloys and to study crack initiation and propagation under various loading conditions, offering valuable data for fracture mechanics and forming limit analyses. In this study, quasi-static and dynamic tensile testing of a vanadium-carbide reinforced aluminum alloy is presented, with full-field strain measurements obtained using Digital Image Correlation. The objective is to evaluate the influence of strain rate on mechanical behavior, visualize strain distribution during deformation, and provide experimental data for the future validation of computational models.