I have a disc made of a malleable metal. It goes through some process which arbitrarily deforms it (bend, shrink, stretch, twist etc). The process is a black box to me right now, but I have some clues based on previous knowledge. Is there a way to decompose the deformed state of the disc into its components? That is, tell me by how much was it stretched, bent, twisted and at what angles? I want to use this information to draw inferences about the system because I suspect the magnitude of one type of deformation can be used to finger print a process inside the black box.
PS: I have posted this before to the physics stack exchange but they felt its more suited there.