Mechanics Based Tomography (MBT): Validation using experimental data

Tomography based imaging is used in various disciplines with the most widely known as computed tomography (CT). In general, they have in common that a signal is measured on the specimen's surface and at multiple locations to reconstruct some type of a material property distribution using application specific constitutive equations. In this paper and for the first time with experimental validation, a novel tomography approach is successfully introduced based on the mechanics of solids. It utilizes the equations of equilibrium at its core embedded in an optimization framework to control the ill-posed nature of these problems. Measured signals are deformation fields obtained from a digital image correlation system with photo cameras. This work demonstrates the potential of mechanics based tomography (MBT) on a composite silicone material. This work encourages to investigate MBT as a breast tumor screening tool to visualize tumors based on their stiffness contrast. Another long-term goal could be to investigate the use of this methodology as a non-destructive testing tool for civil engineering structures such as bridges. Finally, this new methodology could potentially be miniaturized with stereoscopes and extended to map the material property distribution at the microstructure, e.g. grain length-scale.