Measurement of sub-surface delaminations in carbon fibre composites using high-speed phase-shifted speckle interferometry and temporal phase unwrapping

A high-speed phase-shifted speckle interferometer has been developed recently for studying dynamic events. Speckle interferograms are continuously recorded by a CCD camera operating at 1 kHz with temporal phase shifting carried out by a Pockels cell running at the same frequency. Temporal phase unwrapping through sequences of more than 1000 frames allows the determination of time-varying absolute displacement maps. This paper presents the application of this speckle interferometry system to the detection and measurement of sub-surface delamination defects in carbon fibre specimens. The influence of re-referencing the temporal phase unwrapping algorithm after different time intervals is analysed to reduce the random phase errors produced by speckle decorrelation and vibration. The performance of several phase-shifting algorithms to minimize the influence of the vibration noise caused by the vacuum pump used to load the specimen is also investigated.