Abstract
In large-scale structural tests, displacement transducers and potentiometers have been commonly used to measure specimen displacements. Due to the restriction of device installment, however, large and/or multi-point displacements cannot be measured with those devices. In this study, a motion capture system (MSC) is applied to a large-scale structural test for non-contract, multi-point and three dimensional (3D) displacement measurements. The motion capture is a technology to record 3D movements of objects by tracking the markers installed on the measurement target with special cameras. The displacement measurement for a tensile test of an elbow pipe specimen was carried out by using MSC with 127 target markers. The measured values were verified by comparing with those by conventional displacement transducers and total-station. Finite element analysis was also conducted to compare the displacement distributions. The verified results show that the displacement by motion capture system can be measured with 1mm of difference compared to previous conventional displacement measurements, and provided comparable displacement distributions with the finite element analysis result.
