Availability of Opal Photonic Crystal Films for Visualizing Heterogeneous Strain Evolution in Steels: Example of Lüders Deformation

An opal photonic crystal film was applied to characterize local strain evolution associated with Lürders band propagation in an annealed low carbon steel. A local change in color of the opal film was observed, which corresponded to the propagation of the Lürders band. In particular, we carried out two tensile experiments for line and area analyses of RGB (Red-Green-Blue) values of the opal films pasted on the specimens. Both of the experiments clearly exhibited a quantitative correspondence between color variation and local strain evolution, namely, the present study demonstrated the potential of the opal films to analyze heterogeneous strain evolution in steels.